Today’s students are missing out on life by not slumming it

It’s with wonder and fondness that I look back on the year I spent bathing in my sink. It was 2002, and I’d just moved into student halls at Birmingham University. I hadn’t been sure what to expect from my new digs – which had a reputation as one of the best on campus – but it wasn’t this.

What had been the height of postwar student luxury in the Sixties was, by the Noughties, shabby. The shoebox bedrooms and utilitarian corridors were run down. And the showers? They ran freezing cold – all the time. Hence my daily soaks in the sink.

For the privilege, I paid around £3,000 from my maintenance loan, which seemed steep at the time and, in hindsight, borders on daylight robbery. But I got off lightly compared to today’s freshers.

While parents have been fretting over tuition fees, the cost of student accommodation has been quietly climbing. When their offspring start university in the autumn, many will find they are faced with a shortfall.

Rooms at Bristol University will cost between £4,769 to £8,605 a year from September. Given that the basic maintenance loan for a UK student is £4,054 – or up to £8,700 for those whose family income is less than £25,000 – it’s little wonder this is being called a ‘‘stealth tax’’.

Part of the problem is the growing reluctance of students to slum it. While my generation considered a warm shower the height of luxury, today’s teens don’t want to give up their creature comforts. Halls are more like hotels – at one set of digs in Glasgow, a helter-skelter whizzes students from the library to the lobby, where they can lounge on fake grass. At London’s IQ Student Accommodation, flats can cost £22,000 a year, and boast floor-to-ceiling windows, double beds, kitchenettes, a gym and 24-hour security. Talk about pandering to Generation Instagram.

In my halls, we whizzed past the laundry room – sealed off for most of the year due to the discovery of asbestos – and lounged on our single beds. Mine was so absurdly lumpen that I sometimes think I acquired a boyfriend simply to have somewhere else to sleep.

We had kitchens, but they were best avoided unless you had a world-class immune system. Most meals were catered (considered posh), but inedible. I existed on jacket potato with a side of sausage roll for a year.

Yet, even though my halls were demolished the year after I left, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

We laughed at the ‘‘TV room’’ which boasted a dodgy projector, around which we huddled to watch the start of the Iraq war, and the bedrooms that were so hot we were forced to wear skimpy outfits even in the winter.

Not only was it a great leveller, but living cheek by jowl with 600 others is a bonding experience. You have hundreds of next-door neighbours, no matter the time of day or night. How many modern students – from the comfort of their luxury flats – can say that?

What’s more, it equips you for life beyond the cosseted world of academia: there can be no better preparation for the crumbling rental accommodation that tends to accompany one’s first job.

As Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, put it this week: “You are more likely to meet your lifelong friends on a long corridor of rooms with shared bathrooms.”

And that’s true even if you have to wash in the sink.