A loose rule of thumb: PhD candidates in the US are treated like students. In Europe, they’re treated like employees.

This does exaggerate things a bit. In both Europe and the US, PhD candidates get paid a salary (at least in STEM). In both places, PhD candidates count as university employees, if sometimes officially part-time ones, with at least some of the benefits that entails.

On the other hand, PhD candidates in both places take classes (albeit more classes in the US). Universities charge both for tuition, which is in turn almost always paid by their supervisor’s grants or department, not by them. Both aim for a degree, capped off with a thesis defense.

But there is a difference. And it’s at its most obvious in how applications work.

In Europe, PhD applications are like job applications. You apply to a particular advisor, advertising a particular kind of project. You submit things like a CV, cover letter, and publication list, as well as copies of your previous degrees.

In the US, PhD applications are like applications to a school. You apply to the school, perhaps mentioning an advisor or topic you are interested in. You submit things like essays, test scores, and transcripts. And typically, you have to pay an application fee.

I don’t think I quite appreciated, back when I applied for PhD programs, just how much those fees add up to. With each school charging a fee in the $100 range, and students commonly advised to apply to ten or so schools, applying to PhD programs in the US can quickly get unaffordable for many. Schools do offer fee waivers under certain conditions, but the standards vary from school to school. Most don’t seem to apply to non-Americans, so if you’re considering a US PhD from abroad be aware that just applying can be an expensive thing to do.

Why the fee? I don’t really know. The existence of application fees, by itself, isn’t a US thing. If you want to get a Master’s degree from the University of Copenhagen and you’re coming from outside Europe, you have to pay an application fee of roughly the same size that US schools charge.

Based on that, I’d guess part of the difference is funding. It costs something for a university to process an application, and governments might be willing to cover it for locals (in the case of the Master’s in Copenhagen) or more specifically for locals in need (in the US PhD case). I don’t know whether it makes sense for that cost to be around $100, though.

It’s also an incentive, presumably. Schools don’t want too many applicants, so they attach a fee so only the most dedicated people apply.

Jobs don’t typically have an application fee, and I think it would piss a lot of people off if they did. Some jobs get a lot of applicants, enough that bigger and more well-known companies in some places use AI to filter applications. I have to wonder if US PhD schools are better off in this respect. Does charging a fee mean they have a reasonable number of applications to deal with? Or do they still have to filter through a huge pile, with nothing besides raw numbers to pare things down? (At least, because of the “school model” with test scores, they have some raw numbers to use.)

Overall, coming at this with a “theoretical physicist mentality”, I have to wonder if any of this is necessary. Surely there’s a way to make it easy for students to apply, and just filter them down to the few you want to accept? But the world is of course rarely that simple.