"For the first two years I was overawed by the place and the final year was just hard work," he said "Today I would love the Oxford experience. Then it just passed me by." This is not a universal experience; individuals like Melvyn Bragg and Joan Bakewell testify that it was possible for clever small-town Northerners to blossom and flourish. But it is easy to overlook how intimidating the Brideshead perception of dreaming spires and glittering prizes can be to those who feel cowed socially, financially or in terms of intellectual confidence. Those individuals might have done better going somewhere like Leeds and finding their confidence being built rather than undermined. But then, hindsight is always a 20/20 form of vision.All of which is just a way of saying that when those envelopes are opened tomorrow they will not reveal simple alternatives of success and failure.

Wherever their A-level results take them, the recipients will encounter snobbery and stereotyping. A young friend was taken aback when she went for an interview this year for a place to train as a teacher at Northumbria University, which has a good reputation for one of the old transmogrified polytechnics. She encountered a first-year medical student at Newcastle University next door who opined that a "Mickey Mouse college is probably the right place to go to train for a Mickey Mouse job like teaching". There's clearly some way to go to develop an pleasant bedside manner there.But it is equally true that wherever today's A-level students end up they will have the opportunity to develop the skills and insight they need to prosper. That might simply mean enduring the process of the UCAS clearing system to find a place at a university other than the one on which hopes had been set; that can be a harrowing experience but then, as the beautiful, proud, cold-hearted anti-heroine Estella says to Pip in the last chapter of the Dickens classic: "Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching."Or it might mean some swift planning of, or even a drift into, a gap year.

"All my chips are on Plan A," as one A-leveller endearingly put it to me the other day. "If that fails, then I'll think of Plan B."It might even mean not going to university at all. One person I know set out on an extraordinarily varied and successful career by sticking a pin in a list of courses at the local FE college and training to be a medical secretary. Within five years she was on the personal staff of the Chief of the Air Force.