Mikołaj Herbst

Common legacy, different paths: the transformation of educational systems in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland

Abstract The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems shared many common characteristics at the beginning of the 1990s. Differences between the national approaches to educational reforms are particularly reflected in the modes of education decentralisation, the level of school autonomy, accountability and funding mechanisms. We believe that different institutional arrangements may have contributed to the divergent achievements of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland in the PISA programme.

The City as a Focus for Human Capital Migration: Towards a Dynamic Analysis of University Human Capital Contributions

Abstract Universities’ contributions to urban development frequently focus on their micro- or macro-scale effects, ignoring the meso-scale effects they have on inter-territorial relationships. Although universities are seen as an essential part of the recipe for successful urban development, there is a lacuna to understanding how they make places and shape urban hierarchies, and this article addresses this question. This article focuses on one university–urban development process, the creation and embedding of highly skilled graduates, to explore what the aggregate effects of universities on places are; it develops a set of indicators to measure graduate attraction and retention as well as the overall composite place effect. The article develops a typology based on these three indicator sets, and tests this using a data set developed from a Polish social media website. It finds that these indicators are a good way of measuring the effects of human capital creation and mobility at the urban scale. The article concludes by arguing that a greater focus is required in studying the roles that universities play in fostering through-flow in places, changing these places’ nature as nodes within wider urban systems and hierarchies, in the context of university–regional development.

Deprywacja społeczno-ekonomiczna w skali mikro w Polsce: badania pilotażowe w powiecie sandomierskim.

Norweski Mechanizmu Finansowy na lata 2009-2014. Projektu predefiniowany: „Ograniczanie spolecznych nierowności w zdrowiu” realizowanego ramach Programu Operacyjnego PL 13.

Migration of Graduates within a Sequential Decision Framework: Evidence from Poland

Abstract The aim of this paper is to identify the main drivers of highly skilled migration between regions. We argue that the spatial mobility of individuals should not be considered in terms of one-off displacements, but rather as a sequence of migration decisions within a certain time period. The important context of the research is provided by the economic transformation of Poland, accompanied by the growing demand for education, and the lack of well-established patterns of graduate mobility. By applying multinomial logit modelling on a unique database of Polish graduates, we find that all the tested migration strategies can be explained in terms of structural factors, human capital characteristics or aspirations/capabilities related variables.