The race is on for A-level students to grab university places before the fee cap is lifted. Pre-Christmas applications reached a record high as candidates scrambled for the last scraps of cheap education. Only the super-rich will be planning gap years at the moment. This, in turn, will create a gap for the rest of the world.

There'll be no enthusiastic teenagers to jerry-build schools in Mozambique, no au pairs for Italian patriarchs to screw and there are going to be a lot of unfound selves slouching around the Indian subcontinent waiting for their backpacking owners.

For Britain, this could be the one good outcome from the whole tuition fees betrayal. For one generation at least, our student population won't be contaminated by a vociferous minority who think they've seen the world and have the beaded bracelets and ethnic ponchos to prove it. And they haven't seen the world – they've seen Peru. The world's not like Peru – not the bit that Britons tend to inhabit when they graduate. It's more like Reading.

This year's nervous and bookish school-leavers, timorously arranging their mugs and kettle, and applying new Blu-Tack to their cherished "Kings and Queens of England" posters in unwelcoming university halls, won't be intimidated by the bloke from the room next door reminiscing about snake bites, snakebite, drug experimentation and Thai sex.

Before you automatically lump me in with the fearful kettle arrangers, let me say that I took a gap year. It was the last stage of my tentative teenage quest not to be a boring person – or at least to deceive the world into thinking I wasn't. Secretly, I knew I was boring. I pretended to be keen on lots of clubs and societies so I had something to write on my UCCA form, but my private shame was the knowledge that all I really wanted to do was stay indoors and watch television. I hear that a lot of kids have the same problem with heroin.

But a gap year was like a certification of interestingness, of roundedness – it showed that you were embracing life's challenges, not festering in a clammy fug of spot cream and self-doubt. It also delayed the terrors of university for a whole year, the first few months of which, as a reward for the stresses of A-levels, would undoubtedly be spent watching television.

As the summer holidays wore on, the pressure from my parents to find something exciting to do with this opportunity, and their disappointment at my defensive apathy, intensified. I was hugely intimidated by my peers' apparent fearlessness. Gap-year-taking contemporaries, particularly as described by their parents to mine, seemed desperate to get out there, see stuff, help people.

The horn of a bull in one hand and a grasped nettle in the other, they stared with wide and flawless eyes into a future filled with hope, while the African/Australian/Mediterranean sun bronzed their skin and dried their zits away. Meanwhile, I was looking forward to a good episode of Telly Addicts, even if its title mocked my affliction.

As it turned out, I did see the world in my gap year, or the world that most graduates inhabit, as I spent nine months of it sitting at a desk in an office. Thankfully, this was almost as unrepresentative a preparation for my adult life as if I'd spent it bungy jumping over the Great Barrier Reef. I was employed as a general dogsbody in the department of Oxford University Press where they compile dictionaries for learners of English, for which I earned £4.50 an hour. It was six years before I achieved that rate of pay again.

Proof-reading dictionaries is a mind-numbing task even for the slapdash and confident. For the nerdy, conscientious and borderline obsessive-compulsive, who nevertheless has the attention span of the TV generation, it's like torture. It feels both amazingly dull and monumentally important – like social history. I only wish someone had reassured me that if, horror of horrors, a dictionary went to press with a mistake in it, no one would die.

As months of staring at a computer screen went by, as I learned how to really savour a loo break and stay awake after lunch by keeping my tongue clamped firmly between molars, my mind began to wander. But I wasn't reminiscing about last night's episode of The Bill, I was wondering whether or not I had cancer. Most of the time, I thought I probably had. Thank God this was before the era of googlable symptoms but, even so, the only relief from my panicked conviction that the whirr of the air conditioning was the throb of a brain tumour would be the realisation that a lump I could feel near my knee reminded me of the bone cancer bit in Shadowlands. The tiny spectre of malignancy circumnavigated my body like a confident teenager hitching round the world.

And then there were the days when I thought I was having a heart attack, which were better as there's only so long you can think you're having a heart attack before, however mental you are, you're forced to the conclusion that it would have finished by now.

What did I do with my hundreds of £4.50s? I glumly went InterRailing. I toured Europe's most beautiful cities as part of a bickering group of frightened nerds. I coped with youth hostels, handwashing underwear and persuading my bowels to open in strange lavatories. I slept on trains. I went round art galleries and museums. There was not a moment when I didn't want to go home.

In Prague we got pissed. Finally. My parents must have been so relieved.

All in all, my year off was so stressful that being back on felt relaxing and I suppose I approached university with more confidence as a result – which puts me in the same category as all the dope-smoking orphanage builders, though I'm loath to admit it.

But times have changed. The country can't afford all that non-vocational time-wasting. Aspirant comedians shouldn't squander months in publishing houses. What use are memories of the sun rising over Ayers Rock to a lawyer?

In an educational environment where students must borrow heavily to join an overpopulated graduate workforce, the less they know of the unreal world across the glittering sea, the less cheated they'll feel.