Not entirely correct: You get paid while doing the Ph.D., but you cannot spend as much time as you want. It typically takes 2-3 years after a Master degree. I haven't heard of anybody who takes a Ph.D. without first doing the Master degree, in Denmark.
I chose not to go for the Ph.D. because I was tired of the university system, and wanted more business instead of Science. With the Danish tax system, that actually makes sense, and therefore they need to attract students with money in order to get Ph.D. students.
I read that a B.Sc. costs society $50,000 and a M.Sc. costs society $200,000. However, a M.Sc. will pay this back many times, and it would even make sense if 50% of them emigrated. Our universities may not have all the bells and whistles of the best American universities, but there is strong focus on skills - students are mostly there for the skills, not for the diploma.
Parents usually don't help out the students much economically, btw. So, getting a Ph.D. degree in Denmark, working in USA and then sending your kids back to University in Denmark eases a lot of things. I have a friend who took the Ph.D. degree in order to make it easier to move to USA, and that definitely made sense. But his son has a strange look in his eyes every time his father tells him that he needs to go to a foreign country to get his university degree ;-) |
