[mto]

AFAIK in most of Europe you have to do a master before the PhD and typical (theoretical) numbers are 3 years bachelor, 2 years master, 3 years PhD. But that's theory, usually it's more like 4 3 4, but obviously there are also people working on the master's thesis for 5 years ;).

I'm from Austria and we switched to the bachelor master thing just briefly before I started to study. Before we usually had 5 years diploma studies and a doctorate with at least 3 years.

Another interesting difference is probably that our studies tend to be completely specialized. So when I studied CS I did only that. If you're interested in history or whatever you just study that in parallel - no tuition and for long we also had no access restrictions - you basically just went there and said you want to study X. 10 minutes later you were enrolled.