The Government Response to the Private Sector Expansion in Poland

Abstract

This series aims to explore the globalization of higher education and the impact this has had on education systems around the world including East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the US. Analyzing HE systems and policy this series will provide a comprehensive overview of how HE within different nations and/or regions is responding to the new age of universal mass higher education.

High research productivity in vertically undifferentiated higher education systems: Who are the top performers?

“…Holding a parallel academic job—contrary to expectations in a country with a large, albeit decreasing, private higher education sector—did not emerge as a predictor of not becoming a top performer. Surprisingly in the context of previous research on Poland (Antonowicz 2016 ; Antonowicz et al 2017 ; Białecki and Dąbrowa-Szefler 2009 ), in two complementary models constructed specifically for social scientists and humanists (the SSH/5% and SSH/15% models), holding a parallel job (in research institutes or higher education institutions) actually increases the odds of high research performance. However, these two models do not pertain to the research productivity of the Polish academic profession in general, only to very high research productivity of its social sciences and humanities segment.…”

Understanding the Development of Technical Universities in Poland

“…In numerous analyses conducted on Polish higher education, only two major taxonomies of HEIs have been developed, which refer to the institutional setup (public and private) (e.g. Antonowicz et al 2017) and, to a lesser extent, the institutions' profile (academic and vocational) (Kwiek 2012a). It should be noted that, on the policy level, technical universities organised themselves via the Conference of Rectors of Polish Universities of Technology (KRPUT), a formal representative body of technical universities.…”

“…Since the early 1990s, the Polish HE sector has experienced substantial changes. Its path of development is often pictured as tumultuous, chaotic and driven by rapid expansion (Antonowicz et al 2017;Kwiek 2010). Between 1990 and 2005, the number of students skyrocketed from 380,000 to almost two million, although by 2017 the number dropped to 1,405,000 (GUS 2016).…”

“…The expansion of HE was largely fuelled by the growth in private-sector HEIs, but the growth of public HEIs (including technical universities) also contributed to the significant increase in the student population, mostly due to the introduction of fee-based part-time programmes (Duczmal and Jongbloed 2007). The massive demand for credentials turned many HEIs into 'diploma mills' (CHEA & UNESCO 2009) and made feebased programmes their key source of revenue (Antonowicz et al 2017).…”

“…Nevertheless, the number of students at technical universities increased from 75,700 in 1990 to 340,200 in 2015. This increase was mostly seen in full-time programmes, which, in principle, maintained quality standards, unlike many part-time ones (see Antonowicz et al 2017). Thus, technical universities remained loyal to their core activity-full-time engineering programmes-but they also had to seek opportunities to compensate for the dramatic decrease in public funding.…”