[jltsiren]

There is no such thing as "the European PhD". A PhD in the UK nominally takes 3 or 4 years, depending on the program. In Finland, it's nominally 4 years (but typically longer), and that assumes that you already have a Master's. It used to be longer, but Finnish universities moved to shorter "American-style" PhDs, because politicians wanted people to graduate faster.

[calf]

There is such a thing conceptually as distinct from how American PhDs are selected and developed. I've alluded to this already without elaborating in full on it.

[jltsiren]

My point was that there several major university traditions in Europe. The differences between them are almost as significant as the difference between any particular European tradition and the American tradition.

The UK is a particularly poor example of how things are done in Europe. In many aspects (such as whether the primary university degree is Bachelor's or Master's) it's closer to the US than the average continental European country.

You edited your comment after I started writing mine. Your idea that the US is still responsible for an exceptionally large fraction of academic research sounds like a leftover from the 20th century. European universities needed a couple of generations to recover from WW2, but since ~20 years ago, there have not been any significant qualitative or quantitative differences between the research output in the US and Europe. (China may also have crossed the threshold recently, but it's too early to say.)

At least not in the fields I'm qualified to judge (computer science, bioinformatics, genomics). There are obviously major differences in both directions in individual topics, but that's because both blocks are pretty small. Neither has enough researchers to cover every subfield and every topic.

American universities fill most of the top positions in university rankings, but that's mostly because the concept of "top institutions" is more relevant in American culture. (That's another aspect where the British tradition is closer to the US than continental Europe.) In many European countries, all proper universities are seen as more or less equivalent as far as education is concerned. Some universities employ more top researchers than others, but that doesn't impact their reputation as educational institutions as much as in the US or the UK.

[calf]

The problem with this view is that it actively obscures the central role that neoliberalization of academic institutions plays in these formations of quality. So I'll give a logical argument: the US remains the most powerful nation on Earth, and it "in-sources" the world's talent to maintain and reproduce its scientific and technological leadership. Inasmuch as political conditions are changing, European neoliberalized academia shall change and develop as well.

Pointedly, I don't define results or leadership as "research output". I mean who was responsible for Crispr? For LLMs? All roads lead to Rome; but today, empires also change shape and form.

[jltsiren]

The US has had to share its scientific leadership for some time already, and China is now seriously challenging its technological leadership. It continues to attract foreign academic talent, mostly because its academic salaries are less competitive against industry salaries than in other developed countries. Because Americans are less likely to pursue academic careers, it's often easier for foreign academics to find opportunities in the US than in other countries.

Who was responsible for CRISPR is good question (I'm less familiar with the advances leading to LLMs). There was a series of incremental advances building on each other from at least Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, the US, France, Sweden, and Lithuania. And the Nobel prize was shared between an American researcher working in the US and a French researcher working in Sweden (and later in Germany).