Marketization, Privatization, and Declining Demographics: Their Impact on Polish Higher Education (original) (raw)
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Creeping Marketization Where Polish Public and Private Higher Education Sectors Meet
Roger Brown (ed.), Higher Education and the Market. New York: Routledge. 2011. 135-145., 2011
The paper intends to discuss changes in Polish higher education related to processes of its marketization. The wider context for transformations in Polish higher education system is the transition from command-driven, communist economy to market-driven, open economy and from a communist authoritarian bureaucracy to a parliamentary democracy. Consequently, “market” and “marketisation” have additional meanings in a country which opened to both as late as in 1989, as opposed to other countries studied in the present volume. It discusses funding mechanisms with respect to institutions, teaching and research (section 2); distinct processes marking the turn towards marketization – increasing financial self-reliance of academic institutions (section 3) and external privatisation (growth in the number of private sector providers) and internal privatisation (finance-driven cost-recovery mechanisms in public sector institutions), in section 4; finally, it discusses market forces in the context of Polish educational policies (section 5) and provides concluding remarks (section 6).
2009
Hard copies of the research papers are available upon request The Center for Public Policy Studies (CPP) is an autonomous research unit of Poznan University, Poland, founded in 2002. It focuses on research in social sciences, mostly through large-scale comparative European and international research projects. Its major areas of interest include: higher education policy and research in national, European and global perspectives; research and development policies; university management and governance; reforming higher education and its legislation in Central and Eastern Europe; higher education and regional development; public services; the processes of Europeanization and globalization; theories of the welfare state; theories of democracy, as well as political and economic transition in European postcommunist countries. See http://www.cpp.amu.edu.pl/htm. The CPP Research Papers Series is intended to disseminate the findings of work in progress and to communicate preliminary research results to the academic community and the wider audience. Papers are subject to further revisions and therefore all comments and suggestions to authors are welcome.
Changing Public-Private Dynamics in Polish Higher Education
International Higher Education. No. 86 (Summer 2016). 18-20., 2016
The public–private dynamics in systematically contracting Polish higher education has been changing rapidly. In the global context of the increasing reliance on cost-sharing mechanisms and the private sector growth, the Polish system seems to be moving in the opposite direction as our data show. The Polish trend of higher education de-privatization (in funding and enrolments) goes against the global trend of its privatization. The Polish case shows how fragile private higher education is when its dominating demand-absorbing subsector is confronted with a double challenge of changing demographics and massive public financing in the public sector.
In: Marek Kwiek and Peter Maassen (eds.), National Higher Education Reforms in a European Context: Comparative Reflections on Poland and Norway. Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang. 2012. 127-154., 2012
The paper links several interrelated processes in Central and Eastern European higher education: expansion through two types of privatization (external: new private providers, and internal, public universities charging fees in a nominally free public sector), severe fiscal constraints limiting further tax-based growth of higher education, and the gradual denigration of the research mission of universities caused by almost two decades of their continuous focus on the teaching mission and by general underfunding of university research in the region. Long-term consequences of the unprecedented growth of the private sector in Poland in the two decades of 1990-2010 are studied, with special emphasis on the consequences of accompanying processes of the deinstitutionalization of the university research mission taking place in public universities: the decreasing role of traditional academic institutional rules and norms and traditional institutional patterns of academic behavior in Polish universities in the period. A new wave of reforms in Poland (2008-2011) is discussed, as possibly leading to substantially revised rules, norms and patterns of institutional behavior. Poland, with 31.5% of student enrollments in the private sector in 2010 (out of 1.84 million students), provides a unique case to study the two decades of demand-absorbing growth of private higher education with all its advantages and, as mostly discussed in the present chapter, limitations. The overall context of the chapter is the emphasis on further expansion of higher education in Europe argued for by both knowledge economy theories and (repeatedly) by the European Commission policy documents, with a policy wish to close the enrollment gap between the European Union and the USA. Finally, the chapter presents conclusions and directions for further research. Experimenting with privatization in higher education, substantially increasing access to it in the last ten to fifteen years, were especially strong in Central European systems, Poland being the biggest system in the region and the most notable example. New “public-private dynamics” (Enders and Jongbloed 2007), in various forms, emerges in Europe and the chapter focuses on those systems which have used privatization processes for the expansion of their higher education in the context of increasingly competitive public funding for all public services generally, not only for higher education. Especially, the chapter studies the long-term consequences of the expansion through privatization for the system as a whole and for public sector institutions.
The robust privateness and publicness of higher education. Expansion through privatization in Poland
David Palfreyman, Ted Tapper and Scott Thomas, eds., Towards the Private Funding of Higher Education. Ideological and Political Struggles New York: Routledge , 2018
Privatization of higher education is closely linked to its expansion: when systems expand, there appears a fundamental question of how to fund them from the public purse. The growth of higher education in Poland under the communist regime (1945-1989), and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, was frozen: enrolments were stable and higher education was largely inaccessible. Privatization following the 1989 regime change had two crucial dimensions: ideological (accompanying massive privatizations in the economy in general) and financial (financial austerity affecting all public sector services). The financial dimension of privatization was more important, and it was accompanied by a general lack of interest in social policies from policy-makers in the midst of large-scale economic reforms. The two main types of privatization are external privatization (the booming private sector) and internal privatization (fee-paying courses in the nominally free public sector). ‘Education can be privatized if students enroll at private schools or if higher education is privately funded’ (Belfield andLevin, 2002:19); Poland provided examples of increasing private provision and increasing private funding in both sectors. Belfield and Levin (2002) argued that ‘the first factor to explain privatization in education is simple: many parents want it’ (p. 29). Polish students (and their parents) clearly wanted higher education; consequently, as elsewhere in Central Europe, ‘private higher education provide[d] stark solutions to the dilemma of how to keep expanding access while not expanding public budgets’ (Levy, 2008: 13).
The Two Decades of Privatization in Polish Higher Education: Cost-Sharing, Equity, and Access
die hochschule 2/2008, 2008
Die Einführung von Marktmechanismen in den öffentlichen Bereich und die Entstehung eines privaten Sektors werden im vorliegenden Beitrag als zwei Seiten der Privatisierung der Hochschulbildung untersucht. Diese Privatisierung wird dabei als eine spontane Bewegung verstanden, die vor allem vom Hochschulpersonal selbst in Gang gesetzt wurde. Die Analyse dieser Bewegung betont dabei folgende Gesichtspunkte: Die Privatisierung findet vor dem Hintergrund einer Sparpolitik statt, die den öffentlichen Dienstleistungsbereich betrifft. Die interne Privatisierung des öffentlichen Bereiches kann daher als eine Reaktion auf dessen Unterfinanzierung in den Blick genommen werden. Die Privatisierung lässt sich zudem als Ausdruck einer policy of non-policy entschlüsseln, die zur Expansion sowohl des öffentlichen wie des privaten Sektors beiträgt. Herausgestellt werden dabei die Rolle der Studiengebühren in beiden Bereichen sowie die Effekte der Privatisierung hinsichtlich der professionellen Rollen des Hochschulpersonals.
Przegląd Badań Edukacyjnych
The article discusses the problem of creating of a higher education market in post-communist countries in the period of transformation. On the examples of three countries: Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania, the implementation of multi-sectoral social policy paradigm, allowed to show that liberalization of the higher education system was a response to market demand and led to the creation of a model in which both public and private universities operate, and the sources of funding for higher education are also public and private. Due to the growing interest in higher education during the transformation period and the inability to satisfy educational aspirations by the public sector, the countries introduced a market element to higher education, allowing for the functioning of non-public schools. It brought positive effects related to the expansion of the educational offer, but also negative, such as lowering the quality of education.
Structural changes in the Polish higher education system (1990-2010): a synthetic view
European Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 4, No. 3, 266–280, 2014
The paper locates the past two decades of changes in Polish niversities in a comparative European context. It shows a wider transition: from an expanding, privatized and disciplinarily divided university of the 1990s to a publicly funded, increasingly contracting and stratified university of the 2000s (and beyond). The gradual political and economic integration of Poland with the European Union has been accompanied by the gradual integration of the Polish higher education system with Western European systems. The paper argues that the major emergent parameter of higher education policy is demographics and that the remonopolization of the system by the tax-based public sector and the gradual decline of the private sector are transforming the system beyond recognition. Processes of ‘de-privatization’ or ‘republicization’ are gradually replacing recent processes of ‘privatization’. Powerful systemic changes in university governance and funding modes are bound to shatter the relative stability of the academic profession. After two decades of being fundamentally different due to the communist legacy (i.e. being ‘post-communist’), selected Polish universities, owing to accelerating processes of academic stratification linked to the 2009–2012 wave of reforms, have a chance to become fully blown elements of a European knowledge production landscape, with increasingly similar governance and funding regimes and the similarly research-involved academic profession.
The Vanishing Sector. A Case Study on Private Higher Education Institutions in Poland
2020
The main aim of this paper is to introduce the publication of a research-based monograph on private higher education institutions in Poland. A brief presentation of data obtained during a crosssectional study carried out in 2015–2019 shows the challenges that private universities in Poland face. Demographic turmoil is resulting in shrinking funds, and the diminishing number of students is a threat to the existence of some institutions, mostly those which are smaller ones or with a lower number of programmes and students enrolled.