Lucy Kellaway: Cool v Rich – thriving at University not what it used to be

During the decade and a half of creating and running Moneyweb, I made a conscious effort to refrain from coveting what competitors possessed. But the one thing I could never quite eliminate from the list of wanna-have's was work by the FT's inimitable columnist Lucy Kellaway. For 15 years I've admired her ability to always find something fresh and interesting to write about – and then translate the subject into easy, flowing prose. Last year the new owners of Times Media decided to end their 50:50 BDFM partnership with Pearson. That opened up room for the rest of us to discuss relationships with the FT, Pearson's flagship publication. So after jumping through the necessary hoops: Here's Lucy. On Biznews. As she will be every week. For those who have not yet been introduced to Ms Kellaway, you're in for a treat. – AH 

By Lucy Kellaway*

When I arrived at university in 1978 I was driven by my mother in an orange Citroën Dyane with a cardboard trunk containing a few books and my Patti Smith and Talking Heads LPs in the back.

This year students starting university can make a bigger entrance, arriving by helicopter, private plane, MacLaren P1, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce – or by horse and carriage. This is thanks to the Very Important Fresher service launched last week by Uni Baggage, which charges up to £35,000 to transport teenagers and their belongings to uni in style.

The service is not only aimed at unconscionably loaded foreign students who have not been told that Brits don't do that sort of thing. According to the company, there is a small but growing slice of Britain that hasn't been told this either. Increasingly, Brits want to be Very Important Freshers too.

Even those who can't afford the helicopter are nevertheless arriving at university with much more luxurious kit than they used to. The other day I was in John Lewis – the department store patronised by the terminally un-flash, middle classes – to find it festooned with "Off to University" signs over expensive saucepans, duvets and cushions. On the website, the "essentials" list for students consists of more than 60 inessential items including an office chair. Click on the link, and it takes you straight to the Herbert Miller model, priced at £899.

At university in the late 1970s, the first rule for students with lots of money was to pretend they had none at all. I knew only one man who sometimes took me out to dinner in smart places – but he had the excuse of being American.

The new ostentation is so obviously a bad thing it is dull to say so. It's bad for those who splash it about, and it's bad for those with none to splash. Being poor as a student not only seems the natural order of things, it surely motivates you to be less poor later on.

While it is depressing that vast riches are a socially acceptable status symbol for 18-year-olds, they are no worse than more traditional ways of lording it over others.

Two of my children have recently graduated from two different British universities and tell me that to stand out, money helps a bit, though not nearly as much as being cool. This is – and was – the top way of differentiating yourself and is done by following six pernicious and foolish cool rules.

The first way to be a Very Cool Fresher is to treat with disdain everything laid on by the university, shunning all freshers' activities and holding your own parties instead – which is hard if you don't know anyone. Next you must act unfriendly to almost everyone, save a few people you've deemed cool enough. This rather defeats the point of university which is to broaden, not narrow, horizons.

Taking drugs, getting very drunk, chain-smoking roll-ups all help at being cool – as they always did – and they are still just as bad for you.

Being from London is eternally cool. Being from Swansea, anywhere in the countryside, Southampton, Hull, and everywhere else in the world save a few capital cities – is eternally not cool. This is tough, since there is not a lot you can do about where your parents live.

Looking gorgeous is cool. And looking thin. So is wearing the right clothes. The first is unfair, the second dangerous, and the third a lot of hard work.

Being clever is also cool, and getting good marks in all assignments and getting a first-class degree is very cool – the catch being that visibly working hard is not. Being in the library at opening time is only cool if you've been up all night.

While all these rules are familiar to me, they are more lethal now as the cool bar is set far higher. On my first day at university I felt passably cool in my apple green OshKosh dungarees – but that was only because half the girls were in tweeds and twinsets. Now that everyone can buy the same clothes online, to be really cool you have to spend half a lifetime combing vintage shops.

Being a VCF is also more punishing physically because no night out ends before breakfast time; in my day it was no shame for a cool person to go to bed at midnight. This makes it fantastically tough to be cool and do well, and doing well itself is even more important than it was for us, as we knew we'd all get decentish jobs at the end anyway.

So which is more lethal: the Very Cool Fresher, or the very rich one? I'm going for the former: at least the VRF might buy you a drink or take you for a ride in the Ferrari, having failed to notice that you are not cool enough to be worth bothering with.

* Lucy Kellaway is an Associate Editor and management columnist of the Financial Times of London. For the past 15 years her weekly Monday column has poked fun at management fads and jargon and celebrated the ups and downs of office life. Her first book, Sense and Nonsense in the Office, was published by FT Prentice Hall in 1999. Martin Lukes: Who Moved My BlackBerry(TM) (2005) and In Office Hours (2010) were published by Penguin. Follow her on Twitter at @lucykellaway

(c) 2014 The Financial Times Limited