On this day in 1911 the RMS Titanic was launched. On the same date in 1859 Big Ben first started ticking.

And May 31 will always have a special significance for me. It’s remembered as the date of the last paper of my final exams at university – now 25 years ago.

There were other journalism exams to follow. But none of them stressed me out in the same way that finals did.

And I wasn’t the only one. Some finals candidates were throwing up with nerves.

There were 11 three-hour papers to get through, and I still have occasional nightmares when I’ll wake up thinking I’m about to take them again.

Or I’ll dream that I turned up for a paper two hours late or without a pen, or without my trousers, or in any of those weird scenarios that you accept without question when you’re fast asleep.

Do students these days undergo the same, gruelling 33 hours of exams within the space of 10 days? It seems that instead of finals, some courses now involve completing “modules”, whatever they are, or collecting vouchers from the back of cereal boxes.

In the end I didn’t pass as spectacularly as I had hoped, but I didn’t deserve to either. Too much time was spent on extra-curricular activities at the expense of my course.

But looking back I think what I learnt there went far beyond the actual academic work.

One example was my first taste of journalism, working on a student newspaper. It was amateurish and probably very pretentious – and when I look though my scrapbook of cuttings it makes me cringe.But it was probably no more pretentious than some of the upmarket national papers today.

We took it quite seriously, and deciding on front pages and pictures as well as the actual writing was quite exciting. It persuaded me I’d like to do it professionally.

It probably persuaded admission tutors on a postgrad journalism course to offer me an interview. The student journalism ultimately counted for more than my class of degree.

I also bumped into Jacob Rees-Mogg at university, who looked and sounded exactly as he does today. That was an education in itself.

And there were countless other little things I learnt from living away from home. Leaving an alarm clock on the other side of the room ensures you can’t switch it off from your bed.

There were coin-operated washing machines and tumble dryers, so 50p and 20p coins were at a premium. I soon learnt that shirts dry much more quickly if you don’t shove jeans into the dryer at the same time – and require less ironing if they’re hung up as soon as they’re finished.

These may all seem trifling but they’re only a few examples. And the difference was quite noticeable when I met up with a friend who hadn’t moved away for university, but was still living at home and getting the same bus every morning that he used to get to school. His horizons hadn’t widened at all, and it showed.

I had a lot of growing up to do when I arrived in England. I don’t say I did it all in those first four years, but I did a lot of it.

And all this valuable education – whether part of the course or not – was absolutely free.

It wouldn’t be any more of course. Not since Nick Clegg got in with a bad crowd of public schoolboys, who dared him to hike up tuition fees to £9,000 per year. They’ve gone up more since then.

They aren’t fees paid up front. Once graduates start earning £21,000 or more they begin repaying, with the amount they repay increasing with their salary.

In my day, many people left university with debts. Now everyone does, with far higher debts. What will this do to the idea we were all encouraged to aspire to – owning your own house?

The point when you start earning enough to save for a deposit or cope with mortgage repayments is the point at which your tuition fee repayments increase.

That’s probably why the UK has experienced the largest fall in home ownership of any EU country in the last decade.

The proportion of people owning their own home has dropped from 73.3 per cent in 2007 to 63.4 per cent 10 years later. It’s most sharply down among 25 to 34-year-olds. But it’s dropped for all age groups except the over 65s.

Did anyone considered this when they decided it would be a good idea to raise tuition fees?

Or is this another example of a failure in joined-up thinking?