Balancing work, PhD study and teaching means many postgraduates are stretched to the limit.
The press, in contrast, offers lots of weeklies "of the heart", but no dailies of the gutter, just sober regionals, and national papers which read as if all Spaniards were postgraduates in world, Spanish and regional politics.
Sticking to the books can pay off later on; the government's business department says postgraduates earn £9,000 more per year than those who leave university sooner (though this is also influenced by the fact that cleverer students are more likely to stay on).
A recent study reckons that the premium earned by postgraduates relative to college graduates was virtually nil in America in 1963 but had risen to roughly 27% by 2010.
As part of a university, TSE is more recognisably a campus and teaches undergraduates (it cannot select them until the third year), while most of its postgraduates are foreign.
Non-EU students are more likely to be postgraduates and to study science and engineering than indigenous ones.
Curiously, the tuition fees that undergraduates in England will pay are not only consistently high, they are also mostly more expensive than the unregulated fees charged to postgraduates at the same institutions.
Two-thirds of postgraduates who study abroad choose America.
Canada has gone further, allowing all postgraduates to stay and work in the country for three years, with no restrictions.
He was not encouraging students to go to America, he insists, just offering them an alternative to uchimuki, or the culture of looking inward, which pervades Japan.For example, in 1997 there were roughly equal numbers of Japanese, Korean and Chinese students at Harvard, including postgraduates.
The London School of Economics (LSE), for example, has trebled the number of overseas postgraduates in the past 20 years and increased the number of foreign undergraduates by 75%.
