STUDENT days are recalled by most as a frugal era of beans on toast, threadbare jumpers - and the occasional splurge when the student loan arrives.
But for a minority of the world's wealthiest freshers willing to splash out the equivalent of a year's tuition fees, there is a chance to arrive at their halls of residence in style with everything from private jets to Aston Martins on offer for undergraduates with money to burn.
A specialist student shipping company, established in Edinburgh in 2009, has launched the ultimate in luxury travel for students looking to bling up their Freshers' Week experience with some VIP transport.
For £25,000 students can be picked up by private jet and fly off to university like a superstar, champagne in hand, with a fleet of sports cars to whisk them from airport to halls. They can start their student life by rolling up in everything from an Aston Martin or a Ferrari F430 to a Rolls Royce Phantom or a McLaren P1. The car-only packages start at £15,000. Non-petrolheads can arrive "Downton Abbey-style" in a horse-drawn carriage for £10,000.
While the mastermind behind the scheme, Edinburgh university graduate Paul Stewart, acknowledges the service will only appeal to a "niche market" he believes there will be a demand from rich overseas families.
Mr Stewart said: "We're expecting it to appeal to some of our wealthy international clients. In the last 18 months we've had a lot of demand for our shipping services from overseas students, especially rich students from America, Australia and China in particular.
"So that's where we expect to see the main demand coming from, although there are obviously wealthy UK students who might want to use it as well.
"So maybe these international students are arriving at Heathrow - this means they can step off the plane and straight onto their own private jet and be chaffeured to their halls of residence in a Ferrari or Aston Martin, while their belongings are all shipped on separately. The UK students tend to just have a few boxes of stuff, but the overseas students bring a huge amount with them. We think the big business will come from your Oxbridge institutions - Oxford and Cambridge - as well as Durham, Edinburgh and some of the major London universities. And St Andrews. These are the places which attract the big money."
In 2012-13, a third of undergraduates at St Andrews University were overseas students in comparison to the Scottish average of just seven per cent. As well as royalty, the ancient institution has attracted offspring of the rich and famous, including members of America's billionaire Rockefeller and Koch families and the UK's Coutts-Wood banking dynasty.
Around 16.5 per cent of Edinburgh University's undergraduate population in 2012-13 were "non-EU", compared to 4.5 per cent at Glasgow University.
MrStewart, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Belfast set up his specialist shipping firm, Uni Baggage, in 2009 while he was still a second-year engineering student at Edinburgh University.
He said: "It came out of my own experience coming across from Ireland. There were removals firms for people moving house, but there wasn't really anything for students with a few boxes. So I set up a specialist student shipping service while I was in Edinburgh and it grew from there. It's a fully door-to-door service, and there was nothing else like it. In the end I decided not to go into engineering and to develop the business."
After graduating in 2011, he moved the business to Northern Ireland and 18 months ago expanded from UK-only to a worldwide shipping service.
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