Polish colleges are constantly adding new programs to their curriculums in a bid to draw the best and brightest from all around the world. As technology reshapes society and the labor market, universities are offering courses tailored to those changes in an attempt to cater to the job markets of the future.
Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, the country’s top seat of learning according to the
Perspektywy 2023 ranking of Polish universities, offers studies in artificial intelligence as well as courses including East European studies, criminal rehabilitation pedagogy coupled with social prevention, and social data analysis.
The University of Warsaw (UW) shared the top of the ranking with the Jagiellonian and has expanded its offer to include biophysics, geoinformatics and geophysics in geoengineering, and social and public policy, in addition to quantum physics and chemistry. UW also offers programs in cybersecurity, EU energy and climate law, and nanoengineering.
Meanwhile technical universities across the country have expanded the opportunities they offer to include studies in the technology of ‘industry 5.0,’ the engineering of the Internet of things, industrial logistics, materials and technologies of the future, as well as textronics: the study of ‘smart’ textiles and clothes.
But as the brave new world forges ahead, some more traditional subjects are falling behind and having difficulty attracting candidates.
Poland’s most and least popular courses
The results of Poland’s high-school finals will not be published until July 9, but already prospective higher education students are submitting applications for the courses of their choice. The most popular can be oversubscribed by over thirty-fold, Business Insider reported, with the course most inundated with applications being medicine at UW. The school’s least popular subject this year is scientific information and library studies with just 0.4 applicants per available space.
Other unpopular subjects include Baltic language studies, foreign language teaching, preschool and general pedagogy, as well as Russian and Belarusian language studies.
Meanwhile, at Jagiellonian University, Russian language studies topped the list of the least attractive programs, followed by biology, Romanian language studies, chemistry, and physics for business.
Nationally, the top 10 most popular university subjects last year in terms of the number of applicants per place were: social informatics, Korean studies, green technology, Oriental-Korean studies, as well as information technology and intelligent systems.
At the same time, the courses that attracted the fewest applications last year were: gardening, physics, food technology and human nutrition, food security, scientific information and library studies, Slavic studies, foreign language teaching, cultural heritage management, Belarusian language studies coupled with English, and special needs education.
As the modern world reshapes around new technologies, the choice of course after high school graduation can make or break future careers. Research conducted in the United States has shown that over 40% of college graduates regret the course they chose. CNBC reported in 2022 that a study by the ZipRecruiter website had revealed that journalism headed the list of subjects graduates regretted studying, followed by sociology and liberal arts. The three least regretted subjects were computer and information sciences, criminology, and engineering, with nursing in fourth place.
