The dynamic changes in tertiary education that were observed in Poland for the last 20 years transformed the Polish educational market and led to the immense expansion of educational institutions. The rapid increase in the number of students that continued until 2006 is however over and Polish universities have begun to compete for their clients. Increased competition along with the pessimistic forecasts for Poland with regard to demographic changes result in the growing demand for the knowledge on determinants of student educational choices and satisfaction. Although the amount of studies in this field is growing, Poland is still substantially underrepresented in the current research. The purpose of this article was to examine the underlying factors behind the choices that Polish students make while pursuing their tertiary education. The research method that combines focus groups' discussions and a survey study among 1,420 business major students helped us to identify the factors behind three phases of the decision making process: pursuing higher education; information search along with final choice of a university; and satisfaction from chosen studies. Our research implies that decision making with regard to tertiary education is multifaceted and longitudinal as it combines a different set of factors in each stage of the decision making process.

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For the last 20 years Polish education faced turbulent changes, first experiencing a rapid increase in the number of students and the dynamic growth of educational institutions, and then facing the reverse trend of decreasing number of students and universities being closed down or facing serious financial problems. Furthermore, forecasts for the next 10 years predict that most of the non-public universities in Poland will experience serious problems to survive in the market. Facing new challenges, universities changed the way they think about their students and the customer-oriented approach became the dominant management imperative for most of them. Ability to understand the reasons behind students tertiary education decisions emerged as a key issue in increasing enrollments. Predicting students choice determinants may be however more difficult than expected as those choices are dynamic and might change over time. While the literature on the university choice factors is growing, still little is evidenced with regard to the dynamism of the tertiary education decision making process and this article is aimed to contribute to filling this gap. We identified that both aspects of students decision making process-pursuing tertiary education and the choice of the particular university-are a subject of change over time and might be conditioned on economic, social and demographic changes of the given market.

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