From Growth to Decline? Demand-Absorbing Private Higher Education when Demand is Over

The growth of the private sector in higher education in Europe – in terms of the number of institutions and the share of enrolments in national systems – has been an educational phenomenon of post-communist transition countries. As Daniel C. Levy (2010: 10) points out, though: “one of the key trends in international higher education, the rapid expansion of the private sector now holds one-third of all global enrollments. However, the growth is not unbroken or inexorable and sometimes stalls and even reverses”. Poland is an example of the reversal in question. While the expansion era (1990-2005) was characterized by external privatization (that is, private sector growth, combined with internal privatization, or the increasing role of fees in the operating budgets of public universities), the current contraction era (2005-2025, and possibly beyond) is characterized by what we term “de-privatization”. De-privatization also has external and internal dimensions: the gradual decline in private sector enrolments is combined with a decreasing role of fees in public universities. The private sector in Poland cannot be explored outside of the context of the public sector: its future is closely linked to the changing public–private dynamics in the whole system. It is useful to explore its future in the context of two major ongoing processes: large-scale reforms of public higher education, and broad, long-term demographic changes. The Polish case study is important for several reasons: the public–private dynamics is rapidly changing in a system which has the highest enrolments in the private sector in the European Union today. In the global context of expanding higher education systems there are several systems in Central and Eastern Europe, and Poland is the biggest of those which are actually contracting. Their contraction is fundamental and rooted in declining demographics. In the global (rather than European) context of increasing reliance on cost-sharing mechanisms and on the private sector growth paradigm in university funding, the Polish system seems to be moving in the opposite direction: global trends towards privatization can be juxtaposed with the Polish counter-trend towards de-privatization