Not excusing the length of the OP's PhD, but I'm assuming you entered with a master's? In the US you typically start a PhD straight out of undergrad, and then t

Not excusing the length of the OP's PhD, but I'm assuming you entered with a master's? In the US you typically start a PhD straight out of undergrad, and then the first entire year (and usually part of the second) are essentially doing a master's in the subject. It might also be field dependent, but 5 years for a US PhD is not unreasonably long IMO because you hardly start the real research work until year 2 at best, probably year 3 by the time you're suitably competent to make legit progress. It's also very common to just staple together published papers here as one's thesis (in the sciences). I think the real problems here are: 1. PhD admissions has gotten increasingly competitive, so now a lot of people need to take shitty predoctoral RA positions for 2 years before they even get to start the PhD. Though this means they should be quicker to be able to start a project once they're in, many programs are inflexible with the expected Y1/Y2 timeline. 2. Some advisors are real assholes and will purposefully hold back students because a 6th+ year PhD student gives very good value per dollar. This is something programs really need to do a better job of protecting against. There's also just advisors that are bad at mentoring/project management (it's not like it is part of their training really), and while a strict cap on the duration of the degree might nominally address this, it's not a good solution for the long term health of the system. 3. To get a tenured professorship is increasingly competitive, and already exceedingly so. Once you start a postdoc you are more "on the clock" in some ways, and where you do your postdoc(s) can be hugely important to if you will get a tenure track offer. So there are also many students that purposely keep PhD status for an extra year just to give themselves more time to find a postdoc they want and make sure they've wrapped up their PhD papers before starting. My impression is that a lot of similar issues exist with academia in the EU, they're just not as baked directly into the PhD experience. Which makes the PhD there much more suitable for someone planning an industry exit all along. Kind of ironic given the US love of industry more generally. Granted, I mostly meet international researchers who chose to exit to the US for one reason or another at some stage of their career, which is a biased sample. But there have been a lot of recent articles about postdoc protests in some European countries as well. The dragging on of career "training" in a ridiculously competitive job market, where the trainees are the primary labor source, is still a problem for academia regardless of when the terminal degree is conferred.