Center for Public Policy Studies

Professor Kwiek in “Comparative Education Review” on “System Expansion, System Contraction, and Access to Higher Education”

Professor Marek Kwiek published a paper “From System Expansion to System Contraction: Access to Higher Education in Poland”  in Comparative Education Review.

Abstract

Access to higher education in Poland is changing due to the demography of smaller cohorts of potential students. Following a demand-driven educational expansion after the collapse of communism in 1989, the higher education system is now contracting. Such expansion/contraction and growth/decline in European higher education has rarely been researched, and this article can thus provide a possible scenario for what might occur in other European postcommunist countries. On the basis of an analysis of microlevel data from the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions, I highlight the consequences of changing demographics for the dilemmas of public funding and admissions criteria in both public and private sectors.

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Link: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670662