Starving, broke, afraid... oh, the joys of being a student

FOR the first time in 32 years, the A-level pass rate has dropped. But thanks to Government intervention, the number of university places has soared to a record high, with some colleges offering incentives to prospective students, such as cashback and free flights home.

Free flights home! Whatever happened to hitch-hiking, or is this now deemed too dangerous for the iPad-wielding, shinyfaced teens now spewing out of our schools? Now they wonder whether to impose themselves on developing world unfortunates in so-called gap years, or to spend three years drinking and having sex before thrusting themselves on companies with an arrogance and unwillingness to perform menial tasks that beggars belief. (I once had a Cambridge English graduate work for me in my fashion department and she was unable to spell ‘fuchsia’.)

Oxford and Cambridge, in particular, instil such arrogance in their students that they are unable, when the country’s most famous columnist is in their midst, to say hello politely.

None of today’s teenagers is remotely discouraged by university fees, given that their parents are awash with debt. (My ex-husband still had his student loan in his 30s, and his only ambition was to keep his earnings low enough so that he wasn’t forced to pay it back.)

But, but, but I wish with every fibre in my being I had got into a good university. I passed three A-levels (I can’t now remember my grades, but I know one of my A-levels was drama, which doesn’t really count given my performance of Olivia in Twelfth Night was very badly received).

But the prospect of my dad having to cough up the bulk of my student grant meant I opted to go to the London College of Printing, astride the Elephant & Castle roundabout, to embark on a media studies course.

I failed to get a degree or even complete the journalism course and not just because of my ano- rexia, already at crisis point during my A-levels. In a Chelmsford multi-storey car park, during a shopping trip with my dad, I felt I left my emaciated body and was hovering in the sky, so delirious was I through lack of food and too much revision, and so I also developed agoraphobia.

On the Tube platform at Moorgate, on my way to my course on the second day, I realised I couldn’t see the name of the station across the tracks.

I thought I was going insane, and was too scared to go on the platform ever again, but it turned out I was merely going blind through lack of food.

SO AT a time when I should have been experimenting with sex and drink and having fun and meeting new people was instead a period of immense fear and confusion. I was still a child, but was living away from home, fending for myself on £20 a week.

Which is why I suppose I am so jealous and dismissive of Oxbridge undergraduates, surrounded as they are by beautiful buildings and immaculate lawns, when all I had was a dirty underpass beneath a roundabout, grubby lecture rooms with plastic chairs, and teachers who were alcoholic former Fleet Street hacks in safari suits.

At the Oxford Union recently, I was envious of all the super- confident young women in short cocktail dresses and eyeliner and updos, the young men handsome in tuxes, when all I ever wore was a baggy grey jumper to match my baggy grey skin, and the only proposition I ever got was from a 50-year-old Nigerian student unable to speak English.

Because I was too ill for a proper education, it took me the next 20 years before anyone on a newspaper actually let me write a word under my own byline. On a daily newspaper, I would sit in the morning news conference too scared to speak in case I pronounced a word wrong, such as Arkansas or St John-Stevas.

My point, in this bask in selfpity and blame and what-ifs, in wondering how differently my life would have turned out if only my mum and dad had been pushy and rich and generous (I remember shortly after I was ensconced in my student flat, where I shared a bedroom with another girl for three long years, my dad wrote asking me to repay the bill on his Access card for my fork, knife, spoon, two pillows and saucepan), is that only a good university education, one of excellence, is really worthwhile.

Grubbing around in what was once a polytechnic, being taught by people who don’t care, is pointless: these young people would be far better off learning on the job.

There need to be fewer university places, not more.