Building a New Society and Economy: High Participation Higher Education in Poland

Abstract

This chapter provides a detailed and extensive assessment of Poland’s high participation system (HPS) of higher education. In contrast with other country cases, Poland’s leap from elite to mass to HPS higher education occurred very quickly, in two decades, after the breakdown of the socialist bloc. The Polish system first experienced both expansion and privatization, which then gave way to the opposite trends of contraction and de-privatization, due to the demographic decline and strengthened governmental regulation. The chapter uses the seventeen HPS propositions to discuss this history and the drivers of massification, governance, horizontal diversity, vertical stratification, and equity issues. The propositions generally fit very well with the country case.