Let's not blame our gap year do-gooders

This year, 200,000 will postpone the slog of university and the tedium of their subsequent careers and spend a gap year travelling the world.

So urgent is the desire of many of them to ease the suffering of the wretched of the earth that unscrupulous tour operators are moving in to exploit the new market in youthful altruism.

As Voluntary Service Overseas revealed this week, the scams have great comic potential. One volunteer paid to survey a coral reef in Madagascar at risk from global warming. Only when he got there did he find that the reef had already been surveyed by 200 well-meaning English men and women. If any more went crawling over it, they risked causing permanent damage..

Yet at the same time that we were hearing about school leavers with the time and money to take jobs which might have gone to locals, financial advisers were warning that today's young had never had it so bad. Students starting university next month will leave with debts of £21,500, warned one financial website..

One in 10 could be declared bankrupt, added a second.

If things are so good, why are so many so poor? A part of the answer is it depends which students you're talking about. In the wealthier parts of London I meet parents who pay for school and tuition fees and then throw in £100,000 or so towards the price of a first flat. The costs of financing a gap year are small change in comparison.

As important as class, however, are the insolent and vaguely dictatorial demands on the young from universities and employers who pretty much insist on a bulging CV.

If you want to study physics at a good university, for instance, it may not be enough to be good at physics.

Admissions tutors want evidence of compassion, commitment, work experience and leadership skills.

Application forms for jobs on the outside have yawning boxes for candidates to fill with details of how they have run an Oxfam shop, got on to the board of an NHS Trust and led a sports team to triumph.

Even if you leave aside the thought that it is not the business of a university or company what their students or employees do in their spare time, we are still making two obvious mistakes. The first is that many of the most dedicated workers concentrate on the task in hand to the exclusion of almost everything else, and there is nothing wrong with that. The best lawyers, engineers, accountants and writers I know are close to being sociopaths, and would look at you as if you were mad if you said they should go snorkelling in Madagascar. Experience is much overrated.

The second is that if we insist that the young must have experience before they can have opportunity, the children of the wealthy who can afford to swan around the world will gain yet another advantage.