People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
In his particular institute, the better you were, the LONGER it often took because the professors found stuff they wanted you to help with unless you were really good at boundaries. My husband took 7 years; a very kind, very bright friend of his needed 8.5.
uh ? which country are you in ? In france like you said you have to do a master before BUT a phd is only 3 years. I'm 26 and I finished my phd - had my defense earlier this year when I was still 25.
It was wrong from me to generalise to whole Europe. I didn't want to be too specific in my comment.
On the other hand, the upside is that we do not have to pay a single dollar for education here as opposed to US.
At least I knew this when I started. And it motivated me to get finished in 3 years.
Someone did give me the advice in this article before I started. Which was good. I wasn't in it for the money. It was the freedom to work on things that interested me that mattered.
What no-one told me later, when I started a post-doc, was that the chances of getting a full-time academic job were close to zero... now that did feel like 3 years wasted.
Now, students must submit their thesis within five years (one of my students very nearly failed his PhD because of this), and there are funding restrictions for continuing beyond three.