Lost opportunity? The Bologna Process in Poland

The main goal of this paper is to explore the political and institutional complexity of the implementation of the Bologna process in Polish higher education within the context of the (a) expansion, (b) social accountability and (c) the internationalization (Europeanization). This paper argues from the perspective that the Bologna process missed a window of opportunity to transform Polish higher education from its elite (Humboldtian) structure into a mass model that would better suit society and the economy. In peripheral countries, such as in Poland, the Bologna process was mimetically inaugurated as part of a much wider political agenda to ‘catch up’ with the West. The structural convergence was achieved automatically, however the content of teaching barely changed. The instrumentalism of Bologna turned it into a political process that utilized higher education in order to achieve strategic political goals. In other words, it obscured the real aims of the Bologna process and without seeing its purposes. The process turned into a meaningless bureaucratic exercise that only consumed a huge amount of time and produced piles of largely useless documents.