Access and Private Higher Education in Poland

Differentiation and academic control over policy in Central and Eastern Europe: The case of Romania

“…In this context, individual academics in public universities rounded out their income by taking teaching positions in private institutions, in spite of the low-quality concerns. Such a strategy is reported in Poland (Duczmal, 2006), but it was common in Romania, as well.…”

“…Distinctions between private and public higher education are fluid, both in general and in CEE particularly, as public HEIs often attract private resources and vice versa (Duczmal, 2006; Enders and Jongbloed, 2007; Kwiek, 2012; Proteasa and Miroiu, 2015). We will not enter into details regarding theories of privatization; instead, for the purpose of this analysis, we limit ourselves to positing two ideal types at the extremes of the public–private spectrum and operationalizing them in terms of higher education funding mechanisms.…”

“…Private higher education emerged at somewhat different moments across the CEE countries. In Romania, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria the communist legislation was amended or replaced with new laws and private providers opened their doors to prospective students in the early 1990s, sometimes without proper higher education legislation (Duczmal, 2006; Nagy-Darvas et al, 1997; Reisz, 1997; Slantcheva, 2005). Private HEIs in early 1990s CEE often resembled the corresponding ideal type well.…”

“…As far as the relationship between public and private higher education in terms of the competition for students is concerned, Duczmal (2006) usefully distinguishes two periods in the evolution of the two subsectors in Poland. The term ‘rivalry’ is employed to refer to the extent to which private and public organizations perceived themselves as competing with respect to overlapping pools of students.…”

“…Such a thrust occurred in all countries in the 1990s, except for Romania, where it had to wait until the turn of the decade and was limited to the matriculation of tuition-paying students. In Poland, public HEIs were allowed to charge tuition fees to ‘part-time and evening-time students, to full-time students but only for repetition of regular diploma courses due to inadequate student performance, and on various short-cycle post-graduate courses’ after a Decree in 1991 (Duczmal, 2006: 234). In Bulgaria, public HEIs registered tuition-paying students on top of the subsidized ones in the early nineties, followed by generalized partial fees (up to 30% of the education costs) in 1999 (Georgieva et al, 2002) in spite of the ‘strong public opposition’ (Slantcheva, 2007: 67).…”