Higher Education Reform in Poland

Abstract

The Polish case stands out due to the parallel existence of prestigious large universities with long histories of scientific advancement and the largest number of private higher education institutions in Europe, which generally offer market-oriented programmes in business and management. Since 1989 Poland has undergone a process of extreme massification, with student numbers having exponentially multiplied. This chapter sheds light on the differential impact of isomorphism and highlights how external pressures can be strategically ‘funnelled’ so that they primarily affect only one part of their initial target, in the Polish case the private HE sector. Like the Czech Republic, the persistence of the historically inherited model of academic self-rule has served to fend off overarching policy change in public higher education. Nevertheless, the Bologna Process has increasingly empowered the Ministry to push for top-down change on the public universities and has incorporated a series of modifications reminiscent of a market-oriented system into its current education strategy. In the following sections, I trace these developments over four time periods viewed from the angle of institutional interlinkages and historical legacies and path dependencies.