Introduction
The changes in society and economy in Poland in the last two decades have been as fundamental as the changes in higher education. The growth in the proportion of the population with completed higher education programs, as illustrated by the difference between 25–34 year olds (43% in 2015) and 55–64 year olds (14%), was the most substantial change brought about by the development of the Polish higher education system following 1989. This substantial generational difference in qualification levels shows the scale of change in tertiary educational opportunities between the communist era of the 1980s and the massification era in the post-1989 period.
In this chapter, we use a demographics-induced massification trend as the main point of reference for understanding the most important phenomena that shaped the higher education system and its institutions (governance, funding, and the academic profession). The rise and fall of student enrollments within the system is thus a...
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Research Council (NCN) through its grant (UMO-2013/10/M/HS6/00561).
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Kwiek, M., Szadkowski, K. (2018). Higher Education Systems and Institutions, Poland. In: Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_375-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_375-1
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