Jayne Dowle: As the dreaming spires turn into a nightmare of debt, who wants to be a student

So when I saw the students occupying Millbank last week in protest at the proposed rise in tuition fees, I was sharply reminded of the differences between this generation of students and my own.

I don't know if it's because I went to Oxford, but we seemed to be so much less street-wise than today's students. Most of us were downright suspicious, if not frightened, of getting involved in the big political issues.

We had seen the anarchy of the Toxteth riots, and witnessed the futility of the miners' strike – in my case, at first-hand – but generally felt that these were someone else's causes, not ours. Politics, in its widest sense, was for the grown-ups.

At university, the "political" students kept themselves to themselves, and generally concentrated their ambitions on running the student union.

Some, such as Matthew Taylor, eventually ended up as MPs. And indeed, even the characters who were to go on to shape our present political landscape – I number David Cameron, Michael Gove and Ed Balls among my contemporaries – didn't distinguish themselves in anything much bigger than the role of Junior Common Room president (Balls) and president of the Oxford Union (Gove).

A few months ago, a reporter from a national newspaper contacted me for "gossip" on Balls, and was astounded to hear that I couldn't recall him leading a single march, or staging any kind of protest. He was far too busy studying and playing rugby.

Some of us got behind the fashionable issues – Greenham Common, the campaign to free Nelson Mandela, Band Aid. But this never amounted to much more than a little light marching, the requisite poster on a bedroom wall, and debates long into the night about whether to vote tactically in the 1987 General Election, fuelled by cheap red wine and Billy Bragg. For us, politics was all about ideology, not survival.

Shored up by the student grant and the security of various benefits, few of us really thought too much about money. We knew also, that however much debt we racked up on our credit cards – it was all that cheap red wine – we wouldn't have much problem finding a job when we graduated to pay it off.

Now, what we have is a generation of students who literally believe that they have to fight for their survival. And these days, it is all about the money. Indeed, if my own parents had been faced with a potential bill of more than 30,000 just for furnishing me with a degree, it is unlikely that I would have even become a student in the first place. Never mind their own working-class terror of debt, I wouldn't have wanted to put them through the worry of never being able to pay it off.

You can't argue that today's students don't have it tougher than us, but direct comparisons only tell half the story. On the one hand, you've got Aaron Porter, the leader of the National Union of Students, the personification of jumper-clad reasonableness, and surely a shoe-in for a safe Parliamentary seat at some point in the not-too-distant future. No one I remember could have been so media-savvy.

On the other, you have the revolutionaries, such as Clare Solomon, president of the University of London Union. At 37, and the mother of a student son herself, she is nothing like anything any of us encountered in the library.

And then somewhere in the middle, we have thousands of young people who, whether they realise it or not, have become a political weather vane for the country. But who would be one of these students today? Not me, for sure. Raised to believe that they could have it all, the degree, the Ikea-furnished student digs, the car and the gap year, they can't believe that it's going to be taken away from them.

In many ways, we've only got ourselves to blame: the natural conclusion of a society which puts the needs of children first can only result in a country full of young people with a sense of entitlement.

We felt entitled to nothing. We accepted the crummy student houses, and the distant lecturers who didn't even know our names. We accepted also that before the "all must have prizes" mentality took root, we were privileged enough to be there, and were not sophisticated enough to question the status quo. The idea of being a consumer of education, rather than studying for its own sake, was alien to us.

As I said, misty-eyed comparisons with "then and now" only tell half the story. Our political leaders would do well to remember this, and to remind themselves that their own student past was a different country.