To offset these expenses and to keep the loan as small as possible, many students in Britain (as in Russia) look for part-time work. Here the differences are not so great. If you work for money you do not have so much time for study; you get less good exam results; you may have to spend more time later retaking examinations; you are tired and frustrated. But you need the work because you need the money and sometimes the work itself is an intriguing introduction into the activities and routines experienced by grown-ups. Finding suitable work is similar in both countries as are the kinds of jobs that students do. Most universities make efforts to employ students on a part-time basis around the campus. Students act as cleaners, librarians, university shop assistants, research assistants and so forth. In the vacations other full-day jobs are available that help to pay for holidays and holiday pleasures. In some years an enterprising student can easily find part-time work; in years of recession everyone is looking for a job and far fewer jobs are available.
Attending all lectures and seminars, writing essays, keeping a part-time job, taking part in meetings and activities of various societies, making friends, looking after one's rented home, keeping control of money and enjoying oneself being independent - this is a very intensive life, but typical for most students.
At the end of three years students take their final examinations and, assuming that they pass, are awarded a Bachelor's degree. Some students spend four years before taking a degree; they include many engineers, those studying a modern foreign language who have to spend one year abroad learning to speak the language fluently, and some others. Future doctors spend three years at university, followed by four years training in the hospital.
Exams, like all exams at school are written. By this stage the written examination usually lasts three hours. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, three hours the next morning... this routine can continue for several days until the students are on the point of collapse. For the next two or three weeks the university lecturers who happen to be examiners read these lengthy, ill-written, inspired exam papers and also reach (he point of collapse.
Graduation ceremonies take place a few weeks later. They are held in the main university hall or sometimes in some dignified old building in the town. Students receive their degree certificates wearing elaborate academic dress (which they usually hire), their proud parents take photographs, and then they have to step out into 'the real world'. Most of them have seen quite a lot of the 'real world' already.
A small minority of undergraduates go on to take further degrees. Despite what you may have heard, there is no regular pattern of 'doing a bachelor's degree' and then doing a 'master's degree'. In any case, the range of second and further degrees in Britain is huge and complex - and depends on the arrangements of each autonomous university. There are MAs which take two years and MAs which take one year; the Scottish MA is roughly equivalent to the English BA. Other post-graduate degrees include MPhil, MSc, MBA, L1M, PhD, DLitt, DSc. and many others. Some of these are obtained by doing another 'taught course' and some by writing a thesis. A degree awarded for a taught course in one university may be awarded for a thesis in another university. Would-be postgraduates have to find out what is involved in each degree in each university before deciding where to apply. Although some students take their second degree in the same university as their first degree, many more move to another university, where they may find that the ethos, the academic programme and the amount of work they are expected to do independently is quite different from what they had expected. The Russian postgraduate system is much more coherent, centralized and rigid.
Unlike funding for undergraduate courses which is essentially the responsibility of the state, funding for different kinds of postgraduate courses is the responsibility of the graduate students who have to look for scholarships, grants, special funds - or earn the money themselves. So our postgraduates are struggling financially much as yours are. The state which is so ready to insist that undergraduate education should be essentially free, takes a very different view of postgraduate study and pays only for a very small number of very brilliant graduates. However, it also pays big sums to universities for research.
Consequently, while the undergraduates in our universities are almost all British (or at least have entered via A-levels) British postgraduates find they are competing for limited but flexible numbers of places with foreigners. Universities try to make money by encouraging rich foreign students who are fluent or reasonably fluent in English to study in Britain. Many foreign governments pay for clever students who have a degree in their own country to come to Britain either for postgraduate research or to join one of the postgraduate taught courses. Those who are not paid by their governments can search websites to find out if any scholarships and specials funds are available to students of their own nationality. Most universities organise special taught courses exclusively for foreign students. For example, my own department runs courses on International Relations for Chinese students and a course on Training Diplomats for Taiwanese students. British universities are delighted to see these foreign students because they provide variety, different points of view, lively intelligence and usually a commitment to hard work. But it must be said that they are also expected to pay. Their fees help our universities to keep solvent!
So, in general, most undergraduates in Britain come from British schools having acquired British qualifications. By contrast, a large proportion of postgraduates come from outside Britain - and pay to do so.
When students leave university with their precious degree they may feel that they have had enough of the academic life and that they do not wish to study any more. They are eager to think about work, partners, a home of their own and a new grown-up life. Then, a few or perhaps many years later, they reconsider. Education becomes important again, not for all of them, but for many.
Some of this desire for education is chiefly a desire for more qualifications. You have 'second higher education' provision in Russia, while we have a rather unsystematic but wide range of university courses for enhancing professional education or for gaining special qualifications.
Just as important, adults look back with regret at opportunities they did not or could not take earlier in their lives, and search for ways of studying in depth. Almost all universities accept mature students who want to study for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree, often on a part-time basis. Not everyone can attend a university once they have adult commitments to families and jobs, even if they still desperately want to learn. Hence the huge success of the Open University which was founded forty years ago. Its courses are chiefly by correspondence and online learning; students build up degrees from year to year, so they can adapt how much time they spend to their personal circumstances. Specially trained tutors mark their essays and hold optional seminars for students within reasonable distance, while lectures and other specialist teaching are often provided in co-operation with the BBC. If the readers of this book are keen to learn more of British universities, a simple way to do so is to study what the Open University has to offer. Today more than 180,000 students are interacting with the OU online from home. Each week, the student guidance website receives 70,000 page hits; and the Open Library receives more than 2.5 million page views each year. Despite much scepticism from professionals in its first years, the Open University has become a kind of national university which has reached out to millions. And, because the students who study at the Open University are necessarily extremely committed, their standard of work is often very high. An OU degree is very respected.