The Rolls-Royce is waiting at the airport as you land in your private jet. The chauffeur, touching his cap respectfully, drives you to your rooms. Your bags, and any furniture you’ve sent ahead to make you feel at home, are already there. As is your valet. He peels you a grape, and you are ready at last to face the hurly-burly of freshers’ week.
This is the vision of modern university life offered by a new student service. I admit I got a bit carried away about the valet, but everything else can be ordered through the Very Important Freshman service.
“The shape of the student experience is changing a lot,” says Paul Stewart, the man behind this idea, launched last week, and clearly a master of understatement. “They have ridiculously huge apartments. They’re living the luxury lifestyle, and this is an extension of that.” There is already “strong interest” in the Rolls-Royce service from students at St Andrews and Durham.
You don’t merely arrive in style either. There are many other ways in which the modern student can be pampered. Stewart, 25, who studied engineering at Edinburgh, also runs Uni Baggage, a company that began by delivering student luggage. Now students use the service to send their laundry home in term time, while parents send back food parcels.
This assumes, of course, that parents are actually at home. Some prefer to stay on the spot for as long as possible. A Cambridge student tells me: “One set of parents stayed with their daughter for four days.”
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Without wishing to sound like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch (“You went to college in a cardboard box? You were lucky”) this is not how it used to be.
At the age of 19, I caught a National Express bus from my home town of Wells, Somerset, to the most celebrated establishment for which I was then qualified: Harlow Technical College, Essex. It’s fair to say I did not travel light. There was a trunk, two suitcases, a rucksack, a bag of books that wouldn’t fit into any of the cases, and very possibly a sleeping bag.
I don’t remember how I carried this from Victoria coach station across London to Liverpool Street railway station, but I vividly recall the two-mile trek from Harlow station to my digs. First, I carried the trunk 30 or 40 yards. Then I came back for the cases and the rucksack. Then I carried the trunk again. And so on. I arrived at my digs in late afternoon, sweating heavily. There was nobody in.
At college the next morning, we had an induction, just like modern students. In our case, we gathered in a classroom and somebody called out our names. Thanks to a misprint, I was known for a week as “Ronald”.
A brief survey of students from those days reveals that rents were about £25 a week, and few people had access to a fridge: they kept their milk cool on the window ledge, and washed their clothes at the nearest launderette. Even the washing facilities were rudimentary. Visiting a friend at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1980s, I went to have a bath. When I turned on the tap, the pipes — decorated with the rust of generations — rattled and made a noise like a wartime bomber swooping low over the college.
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Mind you, not everybody was slumming it then. A friend at Magdalene College, Cambridge, remembers putting his milk outside the window, only to find that his neighbour was hanging pheasants from his own ledge.
And the Tory MP Oliver Letwin fancied himself as a bit of a gourmet when he was at Trinity College, Cambridge. He cooked baked beans like everybody else, but served them in a wine sauce using a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin 1969.
No modern student would dream of cooking beans in a Gevrey-Chambertin, of course. They have people for that.