Debbie Lennard is sorting through the boxfuls of stuff she brought home after graduation, planning what she can off-load. “Ball gown, tick; iPod, tick; lacrosse stick, tick — oh, and that pink tutu I wore to the last fancy dress party, that can definitely go,” she mutters.

Lennard, 22, like hundreds of thousands of students across the country, is strapped for cash. A Cambridge graduate who recently started a master’s in modernism in British art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, in central London, she was “flabbergasted” to discover how expensive life in the capital can be.

“Now that I’ve left Cambridge and the May balls behind I won’t be needing my gowns again,” she says. “I’m hoping to get back some of the money I spent on them to help me live in London.”

The recession has decimated holiday jobs: after paying tuition fees and rent, the average debt is running at £16,000 on graduation. So perhaps it’s not surprising that students are resorting to selling and swapping their stuff online as they try to make ends meet.

Textbooks, second-hand computers, CDs, sports kit, kettles, posters: all have got potential buyers, at the right price .

This month an online trading site that is still making a killing despite the recession is launching a branch for these youthful bargain-hunters.

As a service exclusive to parents who send their children to 600 of the country’s 1,300 fee-paying schools, Schoolstrader.com — with its small ads for Cosi fan tutte tickets at Glyndebourne, second-hand Daimlers, ponies, yachts and Eton college uniforms — has always had a higher grade of trade than general access sites such as eBay. Now its founder, Neil Canetty-Clarke, is targeting his customers’ undergraduate offspring. Universitiestrader.com will open for business for students at 200 British universities in three weeks’ time.

Canetty-Clarke, a father of three who founded Schoolstrader.com with his wife three years ago, explains: “When we started up in our garden shed — in just three schools — it was because we realised that when our children grew out of their pricey violins, cellos and uniforms they could be useful to other families, who could buy them second-hand.

“Now the children of those same families are teenagers and twentysomethings at university. Having spoken to many of them we have realised that students, too, grow out of things. They are constantly in need of textbooks, computers, squash rackets, lifts to London, flat-shares, cheap cars, vacation jobs and ways of trying to make their funds go further. They need to find bargains as much as their parents do — if not more so.”

Universitiestrader.com is planning to appoint a student agent in each British university whose task it will be to encourage students on their particular campus to trade online. As an added incentive the undergraduate who logs the most registrations will be awarded a “decent” cash prize next May. Canetty-Clarke hopes for a million users by this time next year.

Already students are hoping the site will be a money-spinner for them. Nick Rymer, 19, from Dorset who attends the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, expects to owe about £10,000 by the time he graduates, “but I don’t want to have credit card debts and things” so he is planning to sell his tractor — a lovingly restored 1959 Fordson Dexta, a snip at £2,000-£2,500.

“A friend of mine would be up for selling his plough,” he says. “Another friend, Ben, who’s really into his music, said he’d sell his PA system and his beloved guitar ... he also said he’d sell his 100-year-old Victorian grindstone, which he restored himself.

“I want to go to America and travel around, so either I could use the money to fund that or I’d like to use it to buy some more pigs.”

For banker’s daughter Ginny MacLean, 19, a theology student at Durham University whose mother used Schoolstrader.com “to sell my sleigh bed and riding boots”, the attraction is trading with like-minded people in circumstances resembling her own. This, she thinks, lessens the risk of being duped or left with shoddy goods.

“You can feel confident about who you are buying from,” says MacLean, a former pupil at the King’s school, Canterbury, who is hoping to find a bike for less than £50 online.

Lucy Karsten, 24, and Denise Ho, 20, who are studying English and engineering respectively at Oxford University, have some original money-making wheezes.

Karsten is considering selling places on “crew dates” between Oxbridge sports teams, which are always in demand. The dates, which occasionally hit the headlines when they get out of hand, involve single sex sports teams teaming up for a night out in a local restaurant. “I’m sure bidding would get quite high for the blues rugby team,” she says.

“I’m quite a social person, so I’d both buy and sell tickets for student events. Formal hall or ball tickets, queue-jump passes for student nights at clubs or places on the varsity ski trips that universities run would be popular.”

Ho, meanwhile, suggests selling lecture notes. “Whilst selling essays online is illegal, selling your notes isn’t,” she points out. “I haven’t done it myself, but I know lazy students who have fallen seriously behind and so bought their tutorial partner’s perfectly typed and thorough material.”

Back in his garden shed in East Sussex, Canetty-Clark frowns at this suggestion. “The site will be rigorously policed,” he says. “We’ll be checking every ad. There’ll be no selling of anything illegal or improper. No beer funnels, no plagiarised essays and definitely no bongs.”

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