An unprecedented boom in private higher education over the last decade has given access to a college education to thousands of Polish school leavers able to afford relatively modest fees. Annual tuition fees for private colleges range from 3,500 zlotys to about 8,000 zlotys.

The demand has been mainly in subjects seen as useful in getting jobs, such as management, economics, law and marketing, and private colleges have sprung up in the main cities and small towns all over the country. The number of students has grown from 400,000 in 1990 to 1.3m in 1998, of which a quarter were at private colleges.

eanwhile, the number of universities and colleges has grown from 112 at the start of the decade to 266 in the last academic year. The increase has come entirely in the private sector.

The phenomenon not only reflects massive demand for qualifications needed to pursue a successful career but also the critical condition of the state funded tertiary sector. Academics, while clinging to their poorly-paid but prestigious posts, have to moonlight in private colleges to survive. In many cases they have set these up for this very purpose.

Despite the growth in the student body, the number of academic teachers has not changed in the past 10 years. Indeed, fewer students than ever before are staying on to pursue an academic career. In effect, the private sector is ensuring the survival of the state universities where competition for places is fierce and the education is still free.

"We are getting the poorer kids as the better off can afford to pay for additional lessons for their children and then get into the state universities," says Andrzej Kozminski, the founder and head of the Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management (AE&M) in Warsaw, one of the most successful of the crop of new colleges.

The AE&M, located in a refurbished factory building on the outskirts of the industrial district of Zeran was last year awarded an educational quality certificate by the European Foundation for Management Development.

It shares the qualification with schools such as Insead in France and the London Business School. It is also the only one of the new private colleges which has the right to award doctorates.

Nevertheless, Professor Kozminski admits that the academic standard of some of the students at his college, which has a turnover of $6m a year, is low. But the fees from the 6,000 students at the school help to finance its more ambitious academic work.

The academic standards at many of the new colleges are low mainly because they take anyone who applies and who is willing to pay for a course.

The level of teaching at some of the new colleges is well below the necessary standard and the ministry of education is in the process of closing several down. But there is a natural vetting procedure, says Krzysztof Popowicz, who teaches at one of the new schools.

"We find ourselves taking everyone for the first year and then people start dropping out in the second and third years."

Whatever their failings, the new schools play an important role in the regions where they are located. Krzysztof Pawlowski's successful business school in Nowy Sacz, in southern Poland, has put the sleepy town, nestling in the foothills of the Tatra mountains firmly on the national map.

Its graduates go on to good jobs around the country. The private Human Sciences college in Pultusk, 54km north of Warsaw, founded and staffed in the main by academics from the Polish capital, is an example of a college which has revitalised an entire locality.

About 13,000 students are registered at the college in the town, which has barely twice that number of inhabitants. Many of the students come from the surrounding small towns and villages, their parents scraping up the money to cover the fees which run to about 3,000 zlotys ($500) a year.

Students at the state universities still look down on their colleagues at the private colleges. But the new schools, however patchy their standards, are providing educational opportunities in places and to people who otherwise would never have had the chance of getting a college education.


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