The Internationalization of the Polish Academic Profession. A European Comparative Approach

Abstract

The need for more intense internationalization of Polish higher education was one of the major themes in a recent (2008-2012) wave of reforms. In particular, two aspects were focal points in recent policy debates: internationally visible publications as part of “internationalization at home”, and international research cooperation as part of “internationalization abroad”, to refer to Jane Knight’s two “pillars of internationalization”. Recent international assessments of internationalization of Polish higher education were highly critical: both the OECD and the World Bank national reports of the 2000s criticize low levels of international academic cooperation and disappointingly low international research output. In this paper, we shall use a micro-level (individual) approach which relies on primary academic attitudinal and behavioral data voluntarily provided by academics in a consistent, internationally comparable format, with only some references to macro-level secondary data. The individual academic is the unit of analysis, rather than national higher education systems or individual institutions. A new “data-rich” research environment in the international comparative academic profession studies allows for the first time to analyze the internationalization of Polish academics in a comparative quantitative European context. The data used in this study are drawn from eleven European countries involved in the CAP (“Changing Academic Profession”) and EUROAC (“Academic Profession in Europe:Responses to Societal Challenges”) projects: Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.