Higher Education and the Labour Market: A Polish Perspective

The structural conditionality of normal sciences, including state ideologies and financial support, is essential for the structure of higher education. The system’s transformation in Poland, based on the neo-liberal ideology, involved the dependent development model not only to the economy but also to science, with its dramatic decrease of expenditures. This reinforced a negative selection of the scientific cadres, who, by the inter-generation transmission of values and norms, were unable to adopt the traditional scientific ethos. The official ideology tends to transform the structure of academia in the market-oriented corporative management model. As many as over 400 private institutions of higher education were established, based on the ideology of ‘practical” knowledge, which changed education in a commodity and the education process in a vocational training. The overproduction of formally well educated young people, hardly able to abstract thinking, resulted in a high unemployment of the youth. The government’s remedy is to apply this model of education/training to public universities, which are expected to teach for the needs of the current market, notwithstanding the fact that the needs change faster than the education cycle. Instead of teaching students the ability of life-long learning in a flexible labour market, much governmental effort is made to produce formal education by bureaucratisation of universities.