So, you’re a new, post-communist country.  You have an undereducated population; your universities are filled with discredited Marxists; you’re broke, and your constitution says you can’t charge tuition fees.  What do you do?

Well, if it’s 1990, and you’re Poland, you do two things:

1)      Let the private sector rip.  Sure, private universities are low prestige, and they only do cheap subjects like business, law, and social sciences.  But since those were precisely the areas where the – traditionally high-prestige – public universities were discredited most, the move actually worked out pretty well.  Close to 300 private institutions popped up over the following 15 years, often teaching part-time and weekends to a mainly older clientele who had missed out on education during their “traditional” school years under the communists.  At its peak in 2008, privates educated a third of all the students in the country.

2)       Set up a Dual Track Tuition System.  This was bit trickier.  The government didn’t feel it could change the constitution, but it did feel it could re-interpret it a bit. So while it continued to fully-fund a little over half a million students per year (i.e. they attended tuition free), it permitted institutions to enrol hundreds of thousands more students on a private basis, call them “part-time students”, and claim that the constitutional restrictions on fees didn’t apply to this new type of student.  By 2000, the public system had over half a million students studying in this mode.

These revenue-generating solutions weren’t unique to Poland – most post-socialist countries tried one or the other of these policies.  But the combination of the two had particularly positive outcomes where Poland was concerned.  Enrolments more than tripled, from about 500,000 in the early 1990s to 1.9 million in 2007, and the system became significantly more diverse.

But post-2007, a more negative trend took hold.  The “deferred demand” – older students who missed out during the socialist period – finally became satiated, and the post-1989 baby-bust meant that demographic trends started to turn sharply negative. Put those together, and what you have is a system in which enrolment levels – and hence funding – are now in serious decline.

And that makes Poland a country worth watching. Dealing with demographic and financial decline is something many university systems – including parts of our own – will be dealing with over the next decade.  So far, much of the adjustment has fallen on private universities – turns out that the demand-absorbing institutions that do so well when enrolments are on the way up are also the first to get hit when enrolments reverse.  But as the crisis starts to hit public institutions, there will be a lot of lessons from which institutions right across the OECD can learn.