Undergraduate degrees in the United States are four years long. I think in most of the rest of the world they're three years long. I wonder if that is a reason for the higher figure.

PhDs and masters are also absolutely monstrously long in the United States - often literally twice or three times as long as in Europe. Fewer people do those of course but maybe that also adds up to a higher average.

In places like the UK you normally go from zero degrees to PhD in six years, while in the United States you could conceivably only just be fishing your masters work at that point.

Slight nitpick: first degree courses in Scotland are 4 years. And knowing maybe a dozen people who did PhDs in the UK I don't think anyone did it in 3 years - even the people who were full time PhD students took at least 3.5 years (most of us were "Research Associates" on salaried contracts and the average among this group was more like 4.5 years).

Mind you this was in an engineering department in the late 80s and early 90s - things have no doubt changed :-)

I believe that the EPSRC now heavily penalises universities if students are not submitted by the four year point, so the universities have responded by literally just failing you and sending you down if you go over four years. I submitted the day before my four year point.

As another extreme, I have a colleague who completed a PhD with very strong research results in Austria in just two years.

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.

Interesting, thanks.