When I graduated from university, one of my more perceptive mates gave me a T-shirt printed with the University Challenge-style announcement: F. Clee, BA Hons, reading Cosmopolitan.

I regret to say, taxpayers, that they had a point.

My three-year degree course in English Literature did not recommend women's magazines as essential background reading, but they often got closer inspection than did texts supporting James Joyce's Ulysses or T S Eliot's The Waste Land.

In those days of state-funded university education, the layabout undergraduate was legendary. Student Grant was even a character in a Viz cartoon.

One of my pals had a cousin who used to give her a tuppenny piece every time he saw her, to symbolise the taxes he was paying to support her through her worthless existence.

Still, I wouldn't say the three years we spent were a complete waste. We did manage to read some of the greatest works in the English language, university does broaden the mind, and we did get to meet contemporaries from all over the world.

But we also spent plenty of time inventing sick relatives to get us out of lectures and to excuse the late delivery of essays. We discovered the dubious pleasures of cider and Liebfraumilch, required currency for party gate-crashers, as well as learning that the cheapest alcoholic drink available over the bar of the local was ginger wine (16p a measure, and not bad after the first four have been forced down). God knows how I eventually managed to emerge with a certificate I could quote on my CV I have quoted it, too, though never once have I actually had to produce it for any employer.

It's arguable I might just as well have made it up, and had I been in my teens today, I really believe I'd have done better to think about a different approach.

There's been a degree of public lip-curling at the idea of the McDonald's A-level, announced this week as a way of giving equivalent vocational qualifications to youngsters who don't stay on for A-levels. There was a debate about it on national radio, which prompted one wag to suggest that a chap working for a diploma in folk music might emerge with an HN diddly-dee.

That did make me laugh, but it didn't convince me that a qualification in burger-flipping could be any less valid than the time I spent in my ivory tower, "working" for my degree.

Because when I entered the real world, I was in for quite a shock. Being able to explain the pathetic fallacy or identify an iambic pentameter wasn't much use when writing a wedding report. It was rather more important to get my facts straight, turn up on time and hit a deadline when it was imposed upon me. And no amount of poorly grandmas would get me out of that.

A couple of decades later, things haven't changed that much, except that I myself have now experienced the joy of knocking unworldly trainees into shape.

If they (and I, for that matter) had done a stint at McDonald's, we'd have known what work was all about: we'd know that the customer pays our wages, we'd have understood the value of money, learned how to work as part of a team, grasped the importance of attention to detail.

As work-experience youngsters come and go, I am struck by the naivety undergraduates can display. Often, they have no idea that they are being handed an opportunity and they need to grab it with both hands.

I wouldn't go so far as to say, like one commentator has, that a McJob should take the place of National Service. However, I will say this - having a piece of paper doesn't mean you can do the job - but if you got that qualification at McDonald's, it's probably more likely to be true.