By Janusz Mucha, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow

There are many faces of the current crisis of academic systems. There are many points of view on the social functions of research and higher education. It is not possible to cover here all of these faces, aspects and points of view even in one country — in this case, Poland. Moreover, it is difficult to collect all relevant “hard data” on short notice. Therefore, what follows, is a comment based on my participant observation of the system as professor of sociology (but not as sociologist of higher education) who, since the beginnings of economic transformation (from the centrally planned and managed economy to market economy) and political transformation (from state-socialist one-party system to liberal parliamentary democracy), has worked in three public universities and in two private institutions of higher education. Now, I work in one of the largest and best public technical universities in Poland and simultaneously in a medium-sized private college about 90 kilometers from my home town. Sociology is marginal in both institutions (although in the university its role seems to be gradually increasing), so I will not devote space to the analysis of these schools.  In this paper, “college” will mean any institution of higher education, “student” will mean college student, and ”social sciences” will include humanities, but also economics and law.

In the academic year 1990/91, there were 403,000 students in Poland, the overwhelming majority in about 100 public colleges. In the academic year 2006/07, there were 1,940,000 students (nearly five times as many). More than 470,000 of them are in private colleges. In 2007/08, more than 56% of students were female. In 1991 there were two private colleges, while in 2006/07 there were nearly 320 of them. Students in private colleges pay tuition, unlike the full-time “regular” students in about 130 public colleges.  …READ MORE