[throwaway4585]

Many PhDs in America expect you to be self-supporting, so you have to take up a loan. I believe the practice is explicitly forbidden in most European countries, so you have to earn funding before starting your research (I could be wrong on this, especially regarding the social sciences). PhDs in America also last way longer, 6+ years vs. 5 years max, generally 3 or 4 in most of Europe.

Also, and this is veering into anecdotal stuff, PhD students in Europe tend to be fresh out of university, in their early to mid twenties, and their life is still a bit of a mess in many aspects, much of it due to their being in the middle of a PhD with a close and looming deadline. Their American counterparts tend to be more stable and 'adult', have a spouse and kids, maybe partly due to the fact that they start later and take longer.

There are other aspects such as many American labs being much larger so the PI can become some sort of distant god-like figure that you hardly ever meet. Of course all of it is a huge generalization from my lived experience and that of people I know, so other people should feel free to chime in and correct what I've said.

Some things don't change though - everyone is underpaid.

[aroch]

I don't think you have a great grasp on the PhD process in the US

A vanishingly small number of people are paying for their own PhD in the US. You are expected to be _funded_ though. Most programs give you 1-2 years of guaranteed funding (either through research or teaching assistantships) to give you time to find a PI if you didn't start the program with one and apply to grants. Having to secure grants is much different than paying your own way.

Most PhD students are either directly out of a bachelor's program or worked, maybe 2 years, in the field they want to do a PhD in. They're still most definitely in their early to mid-twenties. Are you thinking post-docs?

Length of stay is really dependent on your field of study and your specific work. I have friends who took 3 years to do computationally focused doctorates and some who took 6 years to do biology focused ones. You simply cannot make living things grow faster through sheer force of will.

I guess my last note would be that there's a reason US biology/biochem/bioME PhDs are paid a premium over their European colleagues internationally. And that's probably related to time spent getting their degrees and the depth and breadth of their experiences in the process

[throwaway4585]

Like I said, this is my (limited) experience and that of people I know. It was also a number of years ago. But good on you for taking the time to correct me.

>there's a reason US biology/biochem/bioME PhDs are paid a premium over their European colleagues internationally

Are they though? In many academia institutions wages are fixed.

[aroch]

The vast majority of STEM PhDs are not staying in academia. The handful of recent grads I know who did stay in academia are, as I would put it, in academia-lite. They're in industry and privately sponsored positions or institutes, that pay quite well. Take a look at, say, the Broad Institute at MIT or the Allen Institutes in Seattle. Both are large, academic institutions that pay industry competitive wages.

[throwaway4585]

Oh, then if you're counting industry PhDs I'm not sure how your argument about Americans getting a premium is that well-founded. The US (like many Western countries, but to an even greater extent) has a very strong NIH syndrome, and Europeans themselves are often taught endlessly to sell themselves because they're not assertive enough in their presentations, CVs, SOPs, what have you.

And of course there's the matter that most wages in Europe in the qualified labor force are way lower in general than their American counterparts. I've always thought it was more or less due to research being underprioritized in Europe but maybe that's about to change in the light of current events ;-)

[bboston7]

> Many PhDs in America expect you to be self-supporting, so you have to take up a loan.

This is not true in America, at least not in the sciences. I've never heard of a reputable computer science PhD program in the United States that didn't wave tuition and provide a stipend for its students. Additionally, all of the of the other PhD students I've met in the sciences have a stipend from their program. Sometimes those stipends have strings attached, like teaching requirements.

[vhartman]

I am currently doing a PhD in Europe. The duration of 3 or 4 years is only really true for hard sciences/engineering, and can be much longer in other fields.

The self-support part is not true for the UK at least - I got admitted to the program but did not get funding, so I could have taken a loan. In Germany, I am employed as a 'research assistant' during my PhD, and while underpaid compared to FAANG (or other tech firms), my salary is around the median wage.