A-Level pupils are getting their results this week. Many are celebrating winning a place at university. The next test is to survive the experience financially.

Most will try a combination of student loans, poorly-paid bar jobs and badgering their parents for money.

A few though - and their number is growing - will turn to organised crime.

Dr Paddy Rawlinson, of the University of Wales in Bangor, is a specialist in the subject.

She first found evidence of the Russian mafia putting students through British business schools two years ago.

"They need accountants and lawyers for the more sophisticated business activities we know they are involved with," she says.

Criminals pay fees and guarantee jobs afterwards, she says, and students may sign up to the 'profession' without thinking through the consequences.

Now the National Crime Intelligence Service (NCIS) says the practice is spreading.

Russian mafia

Learning how to throw your weight around and use a gun in the manner of gangsters in films like Goodfellas is not the kind of apprenticeship a modern criminal needs.

Highly trained professionals, some with PhDs, including mathematicians, doctors, and statisticians have all been prosecuted.

Professor Louise Shelley, who is director of the Centre for Transnational Crime and Corruption in Washington DC, points to the role of the Russian mafia whose activities have spread worldwide since the end of the Soviet Union.

And she says the practice of recruiting undergraduates now extends to Britain, where computer students are key targets.

IT skills

Gordon Stevenson runs Vogon International, a forensic computer laboratory in Bicester near Oxford.

Gordon and his team pick apart the evidence crooks leave on computers.

He says the most likely computer crime for the international gangs is money laundering.

They need computer scientists to help them transfer billions of dollars from drugs and prostitution to untainted accounts.

"A bank would be suspicious of someone walking in with $50m in a haversack but they won't be suspicious if you send it in an email," he says.

Poorer students attracted

The NCIS report says police are particularly concerned that some Asian students are taking gang money.

Criminologist Paddy Rawlinson makes no excuse for students tempted to the criminal life, but she says it is a warning of what happens when people feel excluded from society.

She points to 'economically marginalized' students unable to resist the opportunities offered up by crime, having failed to secure legal jobs.

There may be all kinds of modern explanations for taking money from the mafia, including poor racial integration or the burden of tuition fees. But is this not just a modern-day version of a prospect that always faced poverty-stricken youngsters seeking a better life?

The danger is that these days joining a gang might not just look like the only choice, but also a clever one.