Private Higher Education in Poland: A Case of Public-Private Dynamics

From System Expansion to System Contraction: Access to Higher Education in Poland

“…In the knowledge economy, expansion of higher education systems is key, and higher enrollment rates and increasing student numbers in the EU have been viewed as a major policy goal leading to economic growth by the European Commission throughout the last decade (EC 2011;Kwiek and Kurkiewicz 2012). In Poland, until recently, questions of admission, selection criteria, and funding mechanisms were raised under the assumption of an expanding system, with ever-growing numbers of both students and institutions (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007;Bialecki and Dąbrowa-Szefler 2009;Dobbins 2011). Those questions may need to be reformulated for the coming decades of system contraction, however.…”

“…Access to higher education in Poland has been intertwined with public/ private dynamics (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007;Kwiek 2008Kwiek , 2011Kwiek , 2012b. The biggest private higher education system in Europe ("independent private" in OECD statistical terms, fee based in practical terms) may be heavily dependent for its future survival on a change in higher education financingnamely, the introduction of universal fees (for both full-time and part-time students) in the public sector.…”

“…During the expansion period, higher education was both accessible and affordable (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007), and the recognition of its differentiation by type of institution and by mode of studies was low. Paradoxically, the lack of clear differentiation of the educational arena may have seemed in the interest of all stakeholders: students and their parents, public and private institutions, and the state.…”

“…The expansion in Poland in both the public and the private sectors was demand driven: students and their families wanted more access to higher education after the collapse of communism, and their demand was increasingly being met (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007;Kwiek 2008Kwiek , 2009Bialecki and Dąbrowa-Szefler 2009). Higher education was no longer strictly rationed by the state, and massification was fueled by both sectors and modes of study.…”

Understanding the Development of Technical Universities in Poland

“…The fall of the Iron Curtain marked the beginning of a period of turmoil and deep structural change in HE that embraced technical universities. There is rich literature on the transformation of Polish HE covering a wide range of topics, including the evolution of HE policy (Antonowicz 2015b), the rise of private-sector HE (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007), structural changes (Kwiek 2012a), university governance (Dobbins and Knill 2009), research evaluation systems (Kulczycki and Rozkosz 2017), quality D. Antonowicz (*) Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland e-mail: dominik.antonowicz@uni.torun.pl assurance (Brdulak 2016) and changes regarding the academic profession (Kwiek 2003). Although a great amount of literature has addressed the institutional transformation of HEIs (Białecki and Dąbrowa-Szefler 2009;Pinheiro and Antonowicz 2015;Kwiek 2012b;Antonowicz 2015b), little is known about technical universities specifically, although there are 23 technical universities in Poland educating around 320.000 students (21% of the student population in Poland).…”