The urgency to improve the quality of private higher education in Poland

The author, who has been involved in higher education teaching for about 60 years (including about a decade abroad and another decade in the Polish private higher education schools), calls for an urgent reform of the majority of the existing private tertiary education establishments in Poland. Generally the quality of private higher education in Poland (re-established in 1991) is very low. This realisation seems to challenge the post-1991 domestic private higher education foundation premise which assumed that this sphere of human activity can be treated as a commercial good. Presently one third of the total number of the Polish students who have not been granted admission by foreign or Polish state universities are studying in numerous private higher learning institutions. It means that the preparation and predispositions of those students for higher level education are generally beneath the entry examination requirements of the above mentioned state universities. In consequence those students should require higher quality individual care (especially tutoring) than that at the disposal of the domestic private schools. However, in practice those schools are short of high quality academic personnel and the teaching is usually done by rather inexperienced people. In addition, those schools do not provide tutorials in small student groups (except for languages). A teacher of a core subject may have as many as 350-600 students at lectures. A closer look at the founders of the private higher learning schools makes one notice that they do not follow the noble rule of bringing up young people but are rather preoccupied with getting as much money out of this activity as possible. Some of them could possibly be good enough as managers in some other businesses, but generally not in such delicate activity dealing with the minds of the young people. In conclusion, the author suggests discontinuing at least half of the existing more than 300 of such private higher schools and taking under strict quality control the other half.