<p>...particularly considering that said professors do have to keep paying for their advisees until they finish their degrees. That sort of money tends to make one care.</p>
<p>I think it's just that graduate students in the US are expected to take on larger projects and have more publications than their European counterparts. I've heard a few people say that professors in my field are sometimes reluctant to take on postdocs from programs which encourage finishing in a short amount of time -- they're believed to be at the intellectual level of an American senior graduate student rather than an American postdoc.</p>
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I think it's just that graduate students in the US are expected to take on larger projects and have more publications than their European counterparts. I've heard a few people say that professors in my field are sometimes reluctant to take on postdocs from programs which encourage finishing in a short amount of time -- they're believed to be at the intellectual level of an American senior graduate student rather than an American postdoc.
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<p>I think one cannot generalize. In my field for example (statistical signal processing), some of the best journal/conference papers I've seen are actually from Europe, especially France, England, and Germany. There is also excellent work from research groups in the US though. </p>
<p>Anyway, ** if ** I had to generalize (which, as I said, I don't think it's right to do), I'd say that ** on average ** U.S students lag far behind their European counterparts ** by the end of High School **. By the end of their college undergraduate degree (Bachelor's), they are still behind in some areas, especially in math (which is taught IMHO at a much deeper level in Europe). U.S students generally catch up though as they complete master's and first-year PhD coursework. I also agree with Molliebatmit that many PhD dissertations in the US tend however to go deeper than in Europe, not least because they take longer to finish.</p>
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I think one cannot generalize. In my field for example (statistical signal processing), some of the best journal/conference papers I've seen are actually from Europe, especially France, England, and Germany. There is also excellent work from research groups in the US though.
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Oh, I'm certainly not saying the quality of the work in Europe is lacking! Just that European grad students may sometimes be at a disadvantage when applying for US postdocs because professors don't believe they're as experienced as grad students who have taken longer in graduate school.</p>