I remember the moment so clearly. I’d just put on my black academic gown for the first time, had left the college room that would be mine for the next nine months and was crossing Durham’s cobbled streets towards the dining hall for my first dinner as a student.

I was 18, full of hope and expectation, with three years ahead of me studying English Literature and the authors I loved, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf.

Seven years on, though, and life looks very different.

Yes, I had a great time. I read a lot of books, made lifelong friends and played masses of sport. But was any of it truly worth it? Financially, professionally, socially and even in terms of ‘real’ education – would I have been better off turning around, dumping my gown on the floor of my halls, heading back down the M1 and buckling down to a proper job?

Let’s take the money first. By the time I’d finished my undergraduate degree in 2022 – followed by a one-year Masters in English Literature at Bristol University then a journalism qualification – I’d borrowed nearly £60,000, despite doing part-time jobs throughout.

Two years on from finishing my further education, and now that I’m earning a fairly typical graduate salary, thanks to the appalling interest rate my student loan balance stands at £76,227.49. In the past five months, I’ve contributed £335 towards the loan, yet the total amount has risen by £627.49.

I’m essentially paying a ‘graduate tax’ of nine per cent of my gross income for the course of my working life. I may never pay the loan back – 44 per cent of graduates won’t, according to the Government’s own figures – and it’s only scant comfort that the debt will be wiped after 30 years.

Durham is generally seen as one of Britain’s better universities, perhaps second only to Oxbridge. So if I feel like this, what about the 2.86 million other students currently enrolled in other universities across the country?

I became a journalist – a trade for which you don’t need a degree. The proverbial skills needed – in a phrase attributed to the late writer Nicholas Tomalin – are ‘rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’. Whatever of those I’ve managed to develop in my short time on Fleet Street, I’ve done so in spite of my years studying modernist literature, not because of them.

How I kick myself. For £6,250 and in just 19 weeks, I obtained an NCTJ: a professional qualification from the National Council for the Training of Journalists. That, plus a willingness to do anything to get started, would have been enough – and my friend Matthew proves it.

He did the NCTJ at 18 and, just a year later, he’s working as an apprentice at a national newspaper and has written on everything from Labour’s ruinous Budgets to Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Matthew will have all the opportunities in this industry that I will – but his debts are minuscule.

Or take my friend Jacob who works as a fine art consultant, travelling the world selling paintings – on a hefty salary. He didn’t need a degree, either: he’s learnt it all on the job (and no, he didn’t have connections in the art world).

Of course, it could be far worse. Countless other graduates have been left on the scrapheap even after achieving excellent degrees. According to the jobs platform Adzuna, graduate hiring is down a painful 35 per cent in the year to March.

AI, which can plough through simple jobs quickly, is eating the roles of young workers first.

In the past year alone, at least three of the Big Four accounting firms – classic targets for ambitious graduates – have made the sharpest cuts to their university leaver programmes in recent history, with KPMG slashing its intake by 29 per cent and Deloitte and EY by 18.

New statistics from graduate research company Luminate Prospects show that only 56 per cent of university leavers are in full-time work within 15 months of graduating – which means that nearly half are almost certainly stuck back at home with their parents, miserably watching their debts rise.

The latest Government data shows that the median graduate salary – for anyone with a degree aged between 24 and 64 – is just £26,500. That is only £63.20 more than the annual income of someone working 40 hours a week on £12.71 per hour minimum wage.

What’s the point of taking out debt that can surge to six figures over a working lifetime to be no better off than someone in a role requiring little or no training?

The root of this crisis was undoubtedly Tony Blair’s bold – and, in retrospect, reckless – pledge that 50 per cent of young people would go to university. In 1998, he introduced tuition fees of up to £1,000 per year to help pay for this ambitious scheme.

It might have been well-intentioned but the result was to make not going to university feel like failure, while turning millions of young people away from brilliant vocational courses and apprenticeships that are far more suited to the world of work.

Under David Cameron in 2012, fees leapt to £9,000 per year. Astonishingly, the average undergraduate now borrows £53,000 for a three-year degree.

Thankfully, more and more young people – and businesses –are realising what a swindle it all is. Take tech giant Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship: a new training role offering 18-year-olds a five-month pro rata salary of £60,000 – a fortune for most people that age.

The company argues that AI is developing so fast that it wants to train its engineers early to avoid them wasting time and money learning things at university that will be long out of date by the time they graduate.

Rolls-Royce, too, as well as the asset manager Schroders and even MI5 are encouraging talented school-leavers to apply directly and paying competitive salaries to do so. It all feels like a no-brainer for anyone with the right aptitude.

And beyond the dry economic calculations, there is a wider point. Universities are meant to be places of free inquiry and open debate –but have often become factories of Left-wing indoctrination.

According to research by the Adam Smith Institute think-tank, 75 per cent of academics hold Left-wing political views and 90 per cent of British universities censor free speech. Campuses are riddled with far-Left activists and conservative students sometimes fear for their safety.

In my case, thankfully; that wasn’t true: Hatfield is widely seen as one of Durham’s more conservative colleges. But it remains clear that universities are often echo chambers of Left-wing thinking – whereas exposure to the real world will almost certainly be more balanced.

Of course, universities will always play an important role: Britain’s great research institutions such as Oxford, University College London and Imperial College do vital and pioneering work in medicine, robotics and many other fields.

And it’s true, also, that doctors, lawyers and other professionals need to spend time studying before they can be let loose on people whose lives and fortunes may depend on their competence. But for countless roles – including plenty of white-collar ones – a university degree is at best a waste of time and money and at worst actively counter-productive.

It’s too late for me, of course – and for the millions like me who bitterly regret going to university.

But if you’re 16 or 17 years old and thinking of spending three years on a degree without direct application to your future career, I have one piece of advice.

Get a job, start earning – and never look back.