It was Gordon Brown who repeated the mantra of Robert Reich Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary that

It was Gordon Brown who repeated the mantra of Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, that you have to "learn more to earn more". Even the Labour Party, for which education is the Holy Trinity, refuses to come to terms with the reality of student life today.It is New Labour, specifically, which declared that the competitiveness of British workers in world markets depended above all on the quality of their education. It is hampered by out-of-date notions of who students are and what they are like. But the expansion of higher education is one of many achievements that this Government seems unable to take credit for, because it does not really know whether it approves of students. But for the rest of us, economics is our foundation course.It was economics that drove the expansion of higher education - young people were well aware that higher qualifications would decide not just how much they earned, but whether they got a job at all, and so led a demand-led system. Taxpayers might be prepared to pay for a few of the very cleverest to study things of no economic value, or, like Ruth Lawrence and her Knot Theory, which might or might not prove valuable.

It might have been possible to preserve a purist notion of higher education as a good in itself when it was restricted to a tiny elite, but now that a third of over-18s are full-time students, economic factors must predominate. But, as with most losses of innocence, this was a necessary evil. Student life lost much of its romance when it was dominated by job plans and curriculum vitae-filling. This started to happen quite suddenly in 1980, when students peered out of their ivory towers and noticed the long tail of the queue of unemployed people stretching towards them. The idea of learning for its own sake is fast disappearing, too. It is not just the idealism that has taken on a more pragmatic character.

However, there have been important changes in students' attitudes since 1968. A few of those who are asking the electorate for permission to run the country may have become social conservatives in between being sent down from Oxford and election to the Shadow Cabinet, but Messrs Straw and Blair have been moderate puritans all along.Today's survey suggests that they are more typical of students, then and now, than popular stereotypes allow. Mr Blair himself was too young for 1968, but was a serious-minded student in the early 1970s He even took singing in the Ugly Rumours seriously And he didn't do drugs, either. Mr Straw, a serious-minded student leader at the time, was never even offered a joint. For many, it was a liberating experience, just to think for a short time that they were living through a revolutionary moment, and to experiment with alternative values and other hallucinogens. But for most, it was never really like that, as Jack Straw and Tony Blair will testify. It was one of those dawns - false, as it turned out - when it was all right to be alive, but to be young was very all right.