Today's students are living in the lap of luxury, gorging themselves on smoked salmon sandwiches and endless cappucinos in upmarket coffee bars, tapping emails on their swish new laptops and chatting to friends on their iphones.
At least that is what Kevin Sharpe, professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London believes.
Although 175,000 students are still waiting for their loans and grants, Sharpe reckons today's undergraduates have never had it so good.
Writing in this week's Times Higher Education magazine, he claimed university life in the UK was more like an episode of Friends, with students living in "posh pads" rather than the hovel portrayed in the 1980s slapstick sitcom The Young Ones.
"In the town where I live at weekends, students pour not from Aldi but from Waitrose, with bottles of wine and champagne as well as bottled water (bottled water!), expensive foods and snacks," he wrote. At one university he visited, students were spending more than £5 on snacks from Marks & Spencer. "On that campus, the (costly) coffee bars are crowded all day as students queue to consume four or five cappuccinos at nearly £2 a time, along with freshly squeezed OJ and smoked salmon sandwiches."
He said last year he even spotted a "handful" of gold American Express cards.
According to Sharpe, undergraduates do not stint on electrical goods, with many owning flat screen TVs, Sky subscriptions and iPods.
"Student homes are often equipped with large LCD TVs, Sky boxes and, as burglars have been quick to spot, several high-end laptops per dwelling, offering richer pickings than normal domestic residences, including those of lecturers," he said. This is a far cry from his days at Oxford, when the carpets in his digs were "held together by accumulated grime" and the furnishings "would not even have been accepted by the charity shop".
Sharpe said as a result of this excess many students now live a middle-class lifestyle financed by the "bank of mum and dad". For poorer students anxious to keep up with their peers, the "inevitable consequence is debt".
Is Sharpe living in an alternative reality? Do today's students really have it so good?
