Twenty-five years ago, when I went to open the little brown envelope containing my Leaving Cert results, things were both much harder and much easier than they are for the students who woke up this morning with a similar sense of nervous anticipation.
Harder because, compared with today's school-leavers, we had far fewer options; easier for exactly the same reason. Having choices makes life richer, better and more exciting. It also makes it more complicated and pressurised.
The truth is that I remember very little about the day I got my Leaving results. Strange as it may seem, it just didn't feel like one of those momentous, life-altering moments that burn themselves into the memory. Unlike my first drink, my first visit to the theatre or my first kiss, all of which I remember vividly, it didn't have the rite-of-passage quality it has since assumed.
The rite of passage was leaving school, and that had already happened. The big decision was whether to get a job or go on to third-level education and that, too, had been made already.
All the contents of the envelope would do was to confirm the decision to go to university. A disaster was possible, of course, but with plenty of experience of doing exams, I knew it hadn't happened. A fabulous performance was also possible but, with plenty of experience of skiving off, I knew that that, too, had not happened.
All that mattered was whether or not I'd got the four honours I needed for a grant. If I had, I would also qualify for an arts course. Beyond that, the numbers were immaterial.
If this seems impossibly dull, it was a reflection of a relatively dull society. But at the time dullness itself was considered a great blessing.
We were the first generation that did not automatically consider emigration. The mass exodus of the 1950s was long over and the mass exodus of the late 1980s was not even contemplated. The normality of staying in your own country, getting a job, settling down, seemed paradoxically abnormal, a special favour bestowed on us by history.
These, for those outside the privileged upper middle class, were the standard expectations. And the Leaving Cert was your licence to fulfil them.
Most of those I went to primary school with had dropped out of the system long before. For those who stayed, the options were predictable: the Civil Service, the banks, the ESB, Guinness brewery, or some other source of clerical work in return for a modest wage. Or, for the minority, university.
Of my age cohort in Irish society, about 20 per cent got no secondary education at all, another 20 per cent got third-level education, and the rest made up the steady mainstream for whom the Leaving Cert, if you got that far, really was a farewell to formal education.
The nice part of all of this was that a performance that would now be regarded as relatively mediocre was then seen as wonderful. Today many students announcing to their parents that they've got five Cs and a B will be met with a disappointed frown. Twenty-five years ago, when I got the same result, I was a genius.
The question, moreover, was not for what course at university I was going to qualify. "Going to university" was itself the point. Whatever you were supposed to be studying, you were a bloody marvel.
Things have changed, of course, largely because of the development of a modern economy and the bewildering range of choices it seems to offer. But the change is also, in a simple sense, generational.
My parents, in common with almost all of their peers, left school at 14 and grew up at a time when a pass Leaving Certificate was virtually a guarantee of extreme intellectual virtuosity. Most of today's parents take second-level education for granted. People like me, in other words, were doing something that none of our ancestors had ever done.
Today's students, on the other hand, are emerging from a culture which expects every generation to achieve more education ally than the last one.
Sometimes it's hard not to suspect that the biggest source of grief today will not be the failures of students but the expectations of their parents. The reality, let's remember, is that pretty well everyone getting results today will be able to go on to a good, high-quality third-level course.
Inevitable disappointments should be tempered with the knowledge that anyone who has got far enough to get a disappointing Leaving Cert still has a tremendous range of choices. Parents of my generation should remember how nice it was, all those years ago, to be regarded as wonderful even before you opened the envelope.