Stories about the seediness of life on the university campus are as much a part of the student experience as stealing traffic cones and subsisting off baked bean dinners straight from the tin.

In the UK. the undergraduate lifestyle was encapsulated by The Young Ones, a 1980s BBC television comedy about a decrepit house full of students at Scumbag College, a (fictitious) seat of learning in north London. Amazingly, the dank rooms, dodgy landlords and recalcitrant plumbing that the show epitomised are still recalled with misty-eyed affection by thirtysomethings who would now sooner forgo the annual family holiday in Tuscany than share a bathroom with friends.

Boris Johnson, the UK opposition’s minister for higher education, recalls with enormous pleasure the house he shared with friends in Oxford. “We lived in a sort of a squat that we absolutely loved. There was nothing quite like waking up with a splitting hangover and getting out of bed only to tread on a slug that was like... like a firecracker when it exploded.”

But the days of fetid kitchens, freezing garrets and sticky carpets are fading into social history as the hallowed traditions of poverty-stricken students living like tramps gives way to luxurious, purpose-built splendour.

Across the UK universities and private companies are rushing to build top-notch accommodation blocks boasting free broadband internet, gyms and, in at least one case, a rooftop garden in London.

In some respects the country is simply catching up with the US, which has long provided for its students in considerably more comfort than their British equivalents could expect.

At the very top end of the US market students want for nothing. There has been much talk among the people of Boston, Massachusetts, a multi-university town, about a new luxury block that accepts undergraduate students. Marketed by Precise Realty, the three-bedroom apartments have “plush carpets”, fully kitted kitchens and access to a heated rooftop swimming pool, a gym and saunas.

And The Preiss Company, which caters for students across Texas, has properties that include swimming pools, gyms, games rooms and top-end furnished flats, amenities that would make even the most privileged British undergraduate green with envy.

But the trend towards luxury living has arrived in the UK in a big way, with barely a week going by without another university or development company announcing plans for new blocks of flats specifically designed for students. In late May one of the latest of a rash of such developments was opened in London. The complex of 155 self-contained studios in trendy Clerkenwell is the third such venture in the capital for Studius, part of real estate investment company Investream.

University vice-chancellors, ever anxious to attract more high-fee paying foreign students by adding lustre to the all important “student experience”, are also busy hiring architects to build the new blocks needed to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of the modern student.

The commercial companies see it as an excellent business opportunity. Private-equity group Blackstone is building a £95m accommodation with room for 950 students in King’s Cross, north London, that will have, among other things, “floor-to-ceiling windows” with panoramic views across London. The Nido building will even have its own cinema, basement parking for 41 cars and 250 bicycles and an optional in-room laundry pick-up service.

Financially it is devised along the same lines as a buy-to-let mortgage – with tenants helping to pay off the debt over time. The only twist on a traditional mortgage is that the company is relying on a supply of many individual tenants stretching out into the future. But that future supply does not seem such a bad bet in a country where both Conservative and Labour leaders have committed themselves to huge increases in the number of people who go to university.

Tabitha Aldrich-Smith, corporate affairs director at Unite, the biggest company offering private student accommodation in the UK, says the university population started exploding in 1991 and hasn’t slowed down since. “There was a lot of competition on the traditional private rented sector and institutions have had to find somewhere else to house them all.

“And at the same time students have become more demanding. They don’t want to live in a grotty flat above a kebab shop. And they don’t want to have to spend weeks of term time trying to get it sorted out, arranging for all their utilities and equipping it with what they need.”

Unite calculates that the government’s aspiration of getting 50 per cent of young people through university by 2010 represents a 2.6 per cent growth per year in the number of students over the next four years. And Blackstone estimates that in London alone there are approximately 250,000 students, with 120,000 chasing only 33,000 institutionally owned and operated beds. The capital attracts about 32,000 Chinese students – a 62 per cent rise since 1998.

Unite houses 35,000 students in more than 125 buildings across the country, worth £1.1bn. Its accommodation blocks have all the modern conveniences the 21st-century student consumer demands, including secure surfboard storage in some of their West Country properties.

When it comes to putting up students in style, the UK remains far ahead of many other parts of Europe, particularly the eastern countries that have recently joined the European Union. Poland, for example, offers much that Johnson might approve of. Much of the state-provided provision has not moved on since the Communist era and the private-rented market remains rudimentary. And in Spain and large parts of southern Europe many students go to their local universities and live at home, although this is being challenged by the increasing flows of international students.

But it is in north-west European countries such as The Netherlands, Germany and France that the trend towards what Koen Geven, chair of the European Students Union, calls the “privatisation of student accommodation” is most advanced and where it is helping to push up rents, although the luxuries of on-site swimming pools and gyms are still a rarity.

Rising costs are not the only concern. Johnson is in favour of UK universities’ gaining competitive edge over their counterparts in the US, Australia and New Zealand that are keen to take a bigger slice of the Chinese and Indian student markets. However he also fears it might be “contributing to the infantilisation of students and retarding their development”.

“These hotel-like flats are all very well but they don’t recreate the idea of a household in which everybody has responsibility for something. It is a poor preparation for later life. They give the idea that life will be one long stay in a hotel. Who buys the food? Whose turn is it to the washing up? Who puts the rubbish out? Bring back the The Young Ones, that’s what I say!”

The sense of buying a quintessential part of the student experience off the peg is reinforced by Unite’s drop-in “shop” on a busy street in central London, which has two fully kitted-out show rooms. It displays both the company’s standard offering – a small bedroom and shower room with shared kitchen – and its more luxurious room, which includes its own kitchen, fitted out with granite work surfaces and high-spec appliances.

No one was in when Ben Strickland, the general manager of Somerset Court, a Unite property in walking distance of many of London’s universities, showed me an actual student bedroom. The single-occupier flat boasts a large fully equipped kitchen, bathroom, sitting area and bedroom.

At £285 a week it seemed a bit pricey to me. According to an estate agent just round the corner near Euston station, a bedroom in a four-room shared house goes for between £100 and £130 and NUS figures suggest that an institutionally owned and managed studio flat commands a weekly rent of about £110. But, as Strickland puts it, the occupiers are paying for the comfort of knowing they will never have to worry about changing their light bulbs. For a small extra fee they can have their rooms cleaned regularly and the building has 24-hour security.

Those sorts of prices have alarmed the UK’s National Union of Students, which conducted research suggesting the rise of luxury student living is making less-well-off families struggle.

In the same building a studio with shower and toilet costs £240 a week. A “cluster” of six such rooms share a communal space that serves as kitchen, dining area and socialising space.

But for all the building’s cleanliness, functionality and good management, it wasn’t a patch on the ramshackle terraced house I shared with three friends during my own university days. All the rooms, or “pods”, are identical. In fact, they were prefabricated and ready furnished in the company’s factory in Gloucester before being slotted into the frame of the new building. It looks and has the slightly soulless feel of a hotel.

And in the next academic year Unite will start taking on even more of the responsibilities that used to fall to students themselves. It will start selling to new arrivals packs containing linen, cutlery, detergents and everything a new student might need. All they would require to buy for themselves would be a couple of instant meals to put in their nattily designed cupboards. And the company will also start organising the video nights, social events and end-of-year parties once managed by the students and their unions.

And it seems that the students themselves are all to willing to forgo such trappings of independence. Clare Fenton, a postgraduate studying planning and property development at Sheffield Hallam, is such a happy Unite customer that she chose the company for a second time after completing her undergraduate degree in Huddersfield.

She has friends who persist with old-fashioned student houses but prefers the conveniences she has. As with so many contemporary students, it is a morbid terror of sharing bathing facilities that most puts her off shared accommodation: “I don’t do sharing bathrooms. I’m a bit of a clean freak.”

It would appear the young thrusters that populate today’s universities are in no mood to return to mildewed, decaying houses. In fact, they apparently want to invest money in the soulless motels that so appal Johnson. As I leave the immaculately clean Somerset Court building I notice in the communal space of one flat a copy of the Investors Chronicle – not a journal that would have found favour among the denizens of the 1980s Scumbag College. Strickland tells me a lot of his tenants are interested in going into the City and several of them have been looking to buy shares in Unite.