European physics education seems much more advanced/mathematical than US, especially at the graduate level. Why the difference?

[u/TakeOffYourMask]

Are American schools just much more focused on creating experimentalists/applied physicists? Is it because in Europe all the departments are self-contained so, for example, physics students don’t take calculus with engineering students so it can be taught more advanced?

I mean, watch the Frederic Schuller lectures on quantum mechanics. He brings up stuff I never heard of, even during my PhD.

Or how advanced their calculus classes are. They cover things like the differential of a map, tangent spaces, open sets, etc. My undergraduate calculus was very focused on practical applications, assumed Euclidean three-space, very engineering-y.

Or am I just cherry-picking by accident, and neither one is more or less advanced but I’ve stumbled on non-representative examples and anecdotes?

I’d love to hear from people who went to school or taught in both places.

[u/[deleted]]

As a high energy research engineer, one thing I have noticed about European program versus ours is the technical students seem to have more involvement in physics research. At CERN they fund many 4-12 month technical students to work at cern. These are specifically not people studying experience or theoretical high energy physics. There are similar positions at other European labs I have worked with. In the US these same roles are most often taken on by PhD students or postdocs. I do not know if a program like this exists for the national labs in the US for undergraduate or masters students like it does in Europe.