Higher Education Policies in Poland 1989-2020: Pursuing economic policies, satisfying social needs and strengthening national independence?

PhD Project by Mareike zum Felde

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Jutta Günther, Prof. Dr. Heiko Pleines

The guiding thought of this dissertation is a contribution to unfinished debates in the rather young field of research on higher education (HE) in political science. HE gained attention as a field of study since overall consensus on the importance of primary and secondary education has been reached in most of the developed industrial countries and debates in national politics shifted to the access to and subsidization of higher education institutions (HEIs).

Scholarship discusses amongst others party positions on the HE sector. Since public spending on HE is not diverted back to the whole population as in other fields of welfare policies, parties from a left-right scale tend not to have a clear and expectable position in this field. Furthermore, HE is featured in the literature on the transition of statehood. The delegation of provision of education to private actors and the benchmarks introduced by international organizations (e.g. OECD, Bologna Process) challenge the historically grown responsibility of nation states to provide education for citizens. These processes of internationalization and privatization are taking place in the vast majority of OECD members and are expected to culminate in a global convergence of HE systems. On the one hand there seem to be national peculiarities which still impede this development, while on the other hand it is mainly these international organizations that affect the national discourses about HE policies and link the field to economic or social policies. Against this background scholars discuss to which extent foreign or domestic actors or national idiosyncrasies explain change and persistence in HE systems.

Research to date is based mainly on small-N and large-N studies applying quantitative methods and focusing on developed industrial societies with several decades of sustainable democratic regimes. In my dissertation, I will draw on the described bodies of literature and conduct a case study on a state in transition from socialism and planned economy to democracy and market economy in the long-term perspective. Poland is a developed industrial country as well as an EU and OECD member, but it exhibits a different political trajectory after WWII than the states often examined in the literature. Developments in the Polish HE system such as deindustrialization, the shift from an elite to a mass public model of HE, the introduction of the international benchmarks by the OECD and the Bologna Process were similar to those that occurred in the Western European countries. However, these developments took place within a comprised period of time, and even 31 years after the beginning of the transformation the legacies of the state-centered socialist and of pre-socialist systems of academic self-governance are still highly remarkable in Poland. Given these characteristics, a case study on Poland will allow for new insights into the framing of HE policies between economic and welfare policies, the mapping of partisan positions in that field and the acceptance or rejection of internationalization processes in HE policies.

While most of the studies conducted on the development of national HE systems concentrate on reforms as the policy output, this dissertation will adopt a new perspective and focus on the debates about HE policies. In order to scrutinize the debate level, a qualitative content analysis of debates from the Sejm (lower house of the Polish Parliament) since 1989 and party manifestos will be conducted.

The dissertation is part of the research project “Obstacles to Modernization in the Economy and Science of the GDR and Neighboring Countries in Central Eastern Europe (Mod-Block-DDR)” based at the Research Centre on East European Studies at the University of Bremen.