'It could be you!' The glittering figures of Britain's hot young artists tower above this year's graduates. But have Thatcher's children been prepared for reality and how many will hit the jackpot? John Slyce reports

These are heady days for the young British artist. This is the season when London's art colleges graduate a new crop of talent, all with hopes of becoming the next Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, or Douglas Gordon. Over the next few days frantic final preparations are being made before unveiling the degree show and unleashing dreams of success. But for many, the reality is bitter. Some would simply say it "bites". The phenomenon of the YBA - the young British artist who dines in Soho, perhaps at his own restaurant, and is courted by collector Charles Saatchi - has upped the ante for the young artist. With the phenomenon known variously as the "buzz", "Britpop", or "Britpack" - art's fashionability and its current marketability in a culturally ascendant London - expectations are higher than ever. Degree shows have turned into a national spectacle and for many dealers and gallery directors they are "the event of the season". Once the summary of a student's work, degree shows are now the artist's first public outing.

Of the many graduates to be turned out this year, only a handful can hope to live by their work, let alone enjoy the celebrity of Hirst and co. The hard settling of the buoyant art market of the early 1980s has done little to stem the rising tide of applicants to London's art colleges. So what are the ambitions harboured by this generation of young artists and how well do they feel their art colleges have prepared them for the bite of reality?

Though the colleges strongly deny employing a house style, each has a distinct view on art and education. Of the leading London group - Goldsmiths, Slade, Royal College, Chelsea, Central St Martin's and Royal Academy Schools - each caters to a different clientele of students and dealers. Among prospective students, league tables of the art colleges are set by word of mouth; a buzz picked up on the streets of the art world. At the same time each college proudly advertises its list of alumni all-stars. Goldsmiths has a reputation for being free-form, a place where students form highly personal relationships with their tutors. Professional concerns there are "tied up with meeting the right people at the right parties". The other end of the spectrum is occupied by the Royal Academy Schools where the concentration on traditional skills such as the study of anatomy and life drawing is unlikely to produce a Damien Hirst.

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A tutor - sometimes assigned alphabetically, occasionally picked personally, or at times, in the case of the Royal College of Art, even brought in by request - can make all the difference. Tom Hunter, who has just received his MA from the Royal College, feels he "probably would have left if Peter Kennard wasn't at the RCA. There were times during my darker moments when I didn't feel confident and wanted to leave. Peter managed to say the right thing at the right time. He's inspirational". Agn s Poitevin-Navarre, taking her MA from the Slade, "felt a personal shift. I moved from being a student to an artist. My tutor, Lis Rhodes, had everything to do with this. I have a lot of respect for her; she pushes you and she's honest."

But after leaving college many students feel "left in mid-air". They want to show their work, but lack a basic foundation in marketing it directly. Paul Argent feels "at Goldsmiths the expectations were that you'd be picked up by a gallery before you left". Since leaving he has spent time in business libraries putting together plans that could help him launch an artist-run exhibition space. Such skills too often go untaught.

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For many students self-publicity and entrepreneurship are the foundation of their plan for success, even for survival. They imitate the strategies of the Britpack who are in vogue. David Barrett, collecting his MA from the Slade this month, summed up the profile of such students in a tongue-in-cheek promotional statement he distributed at his degree show: "I am already a recognised and respected player in the art world. You'll find that I have a real appetite for business, with the ambition and a balance sheet to match." Fellow Slade graduate Stuart Mayes sees students' eager marketing of their product as entirely natural: "After 18 years of knowing nothing other than the Tories, all this professionalisation and materialism is not surprising."

In earlier times, graduates set their sights on showing in Cork Street. Today the target of their hopes has narrowed somewhat. Charles Saatchi is a commanding presence; felt by all, whether they actively hope that their work joins his collection or, less consciously, feel that they are pushed to explore alternative strategies in their art by the force of his influence on the art market. Critics and art historians have done little to examine the impact of the market on college programmes or indeed on the lives and work of artists. Hunter feels "the Britpack thing is inspiring, but a million miles away. It's like a lottery: we all hold tickets and Mr Saatchi calls the numbers."

Paul Smith may be one of the few whose number has been called. A photographer with experience in the Royal Engineers, Smith works in digitally manipulated imagery. His RCAdegree show documented his army background with a series of staged photos portraying the acting out of military scenes in which he played all the roles, with the aid of a computer. While Paul waits for the Saatchi cheque to clear he will put his MA to work teaching digital imagery at Oxford Brookes University.

Peter Harris and Charles Avery would be graduating with this year's crop had they not left to pursue their own project - Uncle Grey's, an exhibition space near Old Street. Frustrated at being treated as students rather than as artists, the pair are fashioning their own system of art production which offers an alternative to established markets. Avery and Harris feel that today's art college education should revert to the older, apprenticeship model where students are placed with practising artists. Being an artist, say Avery and Harris, is about "self-protection" and survival. The sooner artists realise this, the better they will be able to cope.

For some, simply coming to London and being at a central art college instils the perhaps misplaced confidence that they "are going to make it". Saron Hughes remembers her early days at Chelsea: "I thought there were only famous artists and failed artists. When I met up with working artists who were teaching and doing other things in order to survive, that was quite a new thing for me." Many of these students are aware that there are very few stable jobs in the working world. They have seen members of other more established professions suddenly made redundant by market forces. Given the realities of the job market they feel they might as well do that which offers the greatest possibility for happiness. Chris Graham, a "mature" graduate of the University of East London, notes: "Becoming an artist is like joining a monastery and taking a vow of poverty. It came to me early on through a friend whom I consider to be very 'successful'. She's in all the art magazines and shows regularly. I called her one day and she was on her way out to do a cleaning job."

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UEL is building a reputation as an up-and-coming place. Set in the heart of east London's thriving artistic community, the university seeks to recruit locally and from a pool of mature students. Graduate Sam Elliott found it "friendly and open. There is very little pretentiousness here". After doing her foundation course at Winchester School of Art, she was warned by tutors to guard against being "too easily distracted at London art colleges", where "it would be all too easy to become a student of fashion rather than an art student". Sam says that tutors are able to match easily a student's work to house styles at the various colleges - "you, you're Goldsmiths, over there it's the Slade" and so on.

Lori Nichol, who comes from a family of artists, is going on from UEL to take a postgraduate certificate in education from Middlesex, formerly Hornsey, College of Art and a hotbed of student activism in the late 1960s. Lori considered Central St Martin's, but found that the students there "looked like they had fallen off a catwalk". She decided to go into teaching after her experience at UEL, which offered students practical working experience and residency programmes in the local east London community. UEL tutor Alison Winckle says: "It's very important to professionalise their practice and ensure that these students are not working in isolation in a studio."

Commenting on the professionalisation of art colleges, David Hockney said: "It's only dentists and accountants who give you confidence when you see their diplomas. All that is taken too seriously now." Chelsea graduate Saron Hughes, who is going on to the RCA, says: "It was really Saatchi that made me aware of all the buzz and Britpack thing. Chelsea tries to protect you from that kind of 'professionalism'. The emphasis there is still on giving you the space to explore your art and be honest and expressive." For Paul Argent, having the ghost of ex-Goldsmiths student Damien Hirst hanging over his head was a distraction from his art. Perhaps Kate Callaghan puts it best: "Britpack is a horrible 1980s habit - you just want to kick it." But without a doubt, many are still made dizzy and dazzled by it.

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PROFILES

* Kate Callaghan and Paul Argent graduated from Goldsmiths last year and have embarked with two partners on an ambitious project to transform an east-London warehouse into an artist-run gallery. Both work with video art, which, despite its popularity among fine-art students, is difficult to place in a gallery.

* Theo SYKES trained as a painter, and has made a monumental installation combining formal aspects of composition and landscape painting with performance art. A Moment of Victory is an allegorical cycle of innocence, anticipation and resolution sourced from Scripture as well as life. After doing his foundation work at Wimbledon, Sykes made his move to University of East London as a way of avoiding what he saw as the 'creative trap' of London's central art colleges. He plans to show in venues that are alternatives to the 'market-driven system of art production'.

* Tom Hunter has just taken his MA at the Royal College of Art.After doing afoundation courseat the London College of Printing, he began working in photography at the Royal College, where he developed an interest in photography's ability to document andtell a story.

Hunter is part ofa group of squatters who have moved into a neglected area in Hackney, east London, and recycled derelict property into homes to createa community.His degree work deals with the lives and labours ofthese ordinary people in their domestic environment. Hunter drew onthe paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the 'golden age' of Dutch art tosee how other groups werepresented positively to the outsideworld. His glowing portraits depictthe squatters as industrious members of a proud community. His work now forms part of thecollection at the Museum of London.

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