Want to go to college? Become a prostitute, it pays.

In a preview of things to come in the United States, one study concludes that as many as 40,000 female students in France are financing their education through prostitution or related sex trade activities because of cuts in government funding of education.

Increasing numbers of young women in France are turning to sex work to help pay the bills while they are at university, according to one of the country's leading students' unions.

According to the SUD-Etudiant union, 40,000 students in France - or nearly 2 per cent - fund their studies through the sex trade.

This could create a strange structure for the "educated" class of society if it goes on long enough.