When I turned up for our planned meeting with one student for this article, he was fast asleep. It was 3pm. His darkened room, when he was eventually roused from slumber, was a tip, and stank rankly of teenage boy. His hair was multicoloured, he had two hoops through his nose and he yawned constantly. He was reading film and video production, said that his biggest expenditure after accommodation and tuition was beer and cigarettes, and that his only physical exertion was skateboarding. He was a magnificent waster, straight from Eighties student central casting. He could have been in The Young Ones. Sadly, he couldn’t be bothered to continue being in this feature, so we will never know how he fared during his first year as an undergraduate.

But he, it seems, is the exception. Once, the words lazy or dossing invariably figured in the same sentence as student, and the general view was that going to uni was a chance to spend three years at the taxpayers’ expense honing one’s drinking skills, talking rubbish into the small hours and becoming expert in work avoidance.

My, how times change. Being a student has now, for most, become a serious and expensive business requiring drive and hard work. Very few 18-year-olds now swan off to university with no clear aim in mind, content simply to while away a few years and hope that career inspiration will strike.

Few could afford to: according to recent government projections, women will take a frightening 16 years to pay off their student debts, and men 11. (The disparity is due to the gender pay gap, and women being more likely to take time off to bring up a family.)

Unsurprisingly, two thirds of students have a student loan, three quarters plan on getting one, and three quarters get jobs to boost their income, though only a third work during term time.

But students appear largely undeterred: according to Universities UK, undergraduate numbers at our higher education institutions rocketed by 45 per cent in the decade after 1994/5. The Department for Education and Skills (as it was then known) reported that 45 per cent of 17 to 30-year-olds were in higher education in 2004/5, while figures for the following year show that nearly 1 million UK students had enrolled on their first, full-time degree course. The government wants half of all young people to go to university by 2010. But while the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills talks predictably about “unlocking British talent” and “widening participation”, what is life actually like for students today? What do they do? How much does it cost them? With the expansion in university education, is one university pretty much like another, or are they all very different? And do undergraduates still live like The Young Ones? We visited three students over the course of their first year to find out.

Victoria Stephens, 19

Reading law, Wadham College, Oxford

From: Cardiff

School: State

A levels: 3 As

Tuition fee loan: £3,145 a year

Times recommends

• Think yourself slim with our hypnodiet podcast
• Why British children are pushed too hard
• So, what really makes you happy?