Poland fears ageing academic workforce as PhD numbers drop

The Polish government has raised concerns about an “academic staffing gap”, as the scientific workforce ages and fewer young researchers enter academia.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, deputy minister of science and higher education Karolina Zioło-Pużuk described a “very difficult” situation exacerbated by a recent reform to Poland’s PhD system as well as ongoing low wages in academia.

The ministry has cited the staffing gap, “related both to the increasing ageing of the faculty and the difficulty in attracting young researchers”, as a “significant problem” that the upcoming Higher Education Development Strategy, currently in its consultation period, should address.

“The main barrier remains the level of remuneration, which remains uncompetitive with the private sector,” the ministry said in a press release. “This is despite record-breaking investments in infrastructure and growing budgetary allocations to science.”

While national pay rises were introduced in January 2024, comprising a 30 per cent increase to teaching staff salaries and a 20 per cent increase for non-teaching staff, academics have said the increase only compensated for inflation and did not constitute a notable improvement to their remuneration.

The 2018 reform of Poland’s PhD system, which saw the introduction of doctoral schools and a universal doctoral stipend, was implemented because “the success rate of PhD candidates was very low”, Zioło-Pużuk explained.

“The idea behind it was that when we’ve got fewer PhD candidates, we’ll be able to provide them with a stipend for the four years of the research programme. Then we will definitely have a higher number of people who will get the PhD at the end.”

Instead, the deputy minister said, “the number of PhD students has dropped dramatically”. Within the European Union, Poland has the lowest share of doctoral students out of the total number of higher education students in the country, at 1.7 per cent; the EU average is 3.8 per cent, according to the latest Eurostat figures.

Moreover, “the number of students completing PhD programmes is not as high as we would expect”, she said, creating “a gap in some areas of science”.

Academia “is not seen as an interesting career in terms of money”, the deputy minister said, with many young researchers taking second jobs that then restrict their international mobility. “They don’t have time to do research abroad,” she told THE. “That makes it difficult because we need to cooperate internationally.”

Without action to address the staffing gap, Zioło-Pużuk said, “we won’t have enough academics to teach at the universities, to do research and to provide us with research on the level that we would expect”.