Creeping Marketisation: Where Polish Public and Private Higher Education Sectors Meet (CPP RPS 13/2009)

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)