LIKE millions of other British parents I spent Thursday gnawing my nails to the wrists in between frantically punching my son’s details into the UCAS Track system to discover if he’d got a place at his first-choice university.

He did! And the relief we all felt must have been visible on Google Earth.

So we are the lucky ones.

But what about all those poor kids who have taken every bit of advice pumped at them by the last government and this one, worked hard, got decent passes and because the folk in charge don’t know their backside from their elbow, are now without a place at university?

Or the hope of apprenticeship or meaningful training?

The advice from the politician known as “two-brains”, David Willetts, was very clear: “Look at applying for slightly less competitive universities next year.”

What, the sort of universities that folk like him would rather cut their heads off with a rusty bread-knife than send their precious darlings to?

And you can’t study stuff like medicine and astro-physics at many uni-versities. So if they want to do those things they are stuffed, aren’t they?

Another thing Mr Willetts carefully avoided was the elephant in the educational room, namely that in England and Wales you pay the same amount to send your kid to a prestigious Russell Group Uni as you do to the equivalent of the Young Ones’ College.

If you are Scottish your kids’ higher education comes free, courtesy of the English and Welsh taxpayers. Naturally.

So why would you hock yourself up to the eyeballs at a college where the degree may not be worth the paper it’s written on?

Especially as Willetts and his clueless henchpersons haven’t one single, sensible idea of what to do about it all, apart from threaten to tax youngsters even more.

I am sick to death of the way young people get treated in this country. Not the yobs who can’t be bothered to get off their fat backsides to do anything for anyone else. But, rather, the vast majority of decent youngsters who toil away far harder than we ever had to, to try and do what us oldsters tell them is right.

Get qualified, we tell them. Aim high. Your reward will be a great job that will get you an additional £100,000 over the average 40-year career.

Well, I am rubbish at maths but even I can see that many will twig this may actually not be worth the financial candle.

In the old days you didn’t have to have a degree to do most things and rightly so. You could do something academic, or you could acquire a practical skill or pursue a vocation.

Now we have swathes of well-educated youngsters stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s and while that won’t hurt them for a while, I don’t think it’s what graduates get themselves in debt to the tune of £23,000 for.

By most estimates there will be 150,000 or more youngsters who didn’t clinch a university place this week. The government should be reassuring them that there is some work or training available but they won’t because there isn’t and they don’t intend to help.

And as if this wasn’t enough, despite everything they do, we still insist on telling these unfortunate kids that A-Levels are too easy, that what they’ve striven to achieve is far easier than in our young day.

It isn’t. In my young day you could get a perfectly decent job after A-Levels. Now we tell young people they have to pay to get a degree or risk being forever on life’s slow-lane.

We want them to pay for their education, pay again when they’ve finished, and contribute to the giant national Ponzi scheme which is the pensions system in order to keep the likes of Willetts in the manner to which they have become appallingly accustomed.

Instead of picking on the kids, let’s tax all the people who went to university in the 1960s ’70s and ’80s and got it for free. They’re the ones with the money now.

And to ALL the young people who worked for their A-level passes – well done. But you definitely deserve better.