Bologna Process and the condition of higher education in Poland

Higher education in the era of globalization, the growing specialization, interdisciplinarity, internationalization – is constantly evolving. With the Bologna process of european education adapts to the changes. In particular, the changes in the way education at the tertiary level, the introduction of quality standards, the promotion of mobility, creating a universal comparable qualifications framework. The article describes the history of the Bologna Process; characterized tools to achieve the main objectives; made a preliminary assessment of the state of higher education in Poland compared to other European countries; an attempt to identify future prospects, developments and challenges.

One goal of the Bologna process is to restructure European university programs from monolithic five-year programs into two cycles, bachelor’s and master’s. In this paper, we ask academic staff (n=52) and students (n=126) at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague about their opinions on the implementation of the two-cycle system at their faculty. Nine out of ten academic staff and three out of ten students prefer the old five-year programs, arguing that the two-cycle system is not suitable for teacher training, subject courses are not sufficiently linked with teaching courses and that bachelor’s graduates cannot find jobs at schools. Students tend to prefer the two-cycle system, mostly because they get the bachelor’s degree. Our results can be used as empirical evidence in discussion about possible changes of teacher training programs.

Within the last decade the most significant development of the European Union in the education field has been the Bologna Process. The reference point of the Process is the European Qualifications Framework at the international level, and national qualifications framework at the national level. The Bologna term of “sector qualifications” is dealt with in two different meanings. The first is related to the hierarchy of the field of education from programme to broad field in the UNESCO approach. The second is sector standards determined according to the needs of economic sectors. This paper is devoted to developing the field architecture of the scientific family of program qualifications. In this work, while the field qualifications have been developed in Turkey, international standard classifications of education, occupations and industries were taken into account; and moreover, qualifications were developed from the vertically and horizontally hierarchical point of view, and chronological perspective. In this work, it is suggested that EQF-LLL and NQF can also be applied to all types of field qualifications.