Perhaps because the Carnegie classifications created compatible categories of universities and colleges across the United States (and facilitated student transfers between institutions), American academics don't realize how programs and institutions are far from streamlined elsewhere, even within a single country. Americans sometimes make the parochial assumption that other people know the Carnegie system. They don't. I have seen European colleagues look blankly at American applicants' references to things like GPA and "graduate credits" ... .

The level of dependence on the state is another difference: In much of the world, universities are all public institutions. Students are accustomed to paying trivially low fees (even at elite institutions like the Sorbonne) and receiving a government stipend while they study. That helps explain the extended time to degree in some countries and the difference in student attitudes in Europe compared with the United States.

Depending on how large their stipends are, students attend the nearest university to their homes and commute, or they move out of their parents' houses into shared apartments and live on the student dole. But the idea that going to a university should cost a student (or a student's family) a significant amount of money faces entrenched resistance in Europe.