Despite the nation’s high unemployment rate, University graduates’ job prospects are improving, career service administrators said. Outside companies posted 51 percent more jobs University-wide in 2010 than they did last year.

Business sophomore Nathan Myers interviewed with Home Depot for an internship last year. Their mock interviews helped him prepare. Though he did not get the Home Depot internship, Myers said company recruiters constantly come to the Red McCombs School of Business to interview students for internships or jobs.

“I think its a good time to start heading out into the market,” Myers said. “I think its good to be going to school now because you can see what the companies did wrong and when its goes bad again we’ll know what to do.”

Fifty-six percent of business school graduates have reported job offers so far in 2011, up from 43 percent last year, said Stacey Rudnick, director of MBA Career Services at the business school.

She said the number will probably still rise since it is early in the year. She also said recruiting before the start of the semester, mostly for internships, increased by 73 percent over the same time last year.

Rudnick said at this point in the year, the biggest increase in job offers to UT business students has been in consulting, followed by computer and high-tech jobs. She said job offers from the real estate sector have not followed the growth seen in other areas.

Ray Easterlin, director of corporate relations and placement for the College of Natural Sciences, said companies have started more actively recruiting students from the college and report coming to job fairs looking for more hires. He said the general trend is toward more job and internship offers, which mirrors economic improvement over the past two years.

“In general it’s increasing, and it’s because the economy is slowly and steadily improving, so it’s really a reflection of that,” Easterlin said.

Large companies including Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are posting more positions and collect resumes from Liberal Arts, but only make up a small part of the recruiting for Liberal Arts students, said Robert Vega, program coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts career center.

He said while large companies use yearly structured recruiting for groups of students at professional schools, including the business school, recruiting at Liberal Arts happens on a smaller and less predictable basis. He said the nature of liberal arts education causes the differences in how companies recruit students.

“There are so many avenues that are open to Liberal Arts students because our academic program trains them not to be better bankers, but instead we train them to be better problem solvers, better analysts, better writers,” Vega said.

Communication Career Services Director Matt Berndt said recruiting in the College of Communication also happens on a different scale and system than in the business school.

“Different industries have different hiring practices,” Berndt said. “We build our services around helping students understand the hiring dynamics in the industries they want to enter.”