Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has caused an increase in the population of Ukrainian origin in Poland, which has also influenced foreigners’ interest in the educational offer of Polish universities. In the 2022/2023 academic year, the number of students from Ukraine has increased by more than 12,119 totalling 48,150.

The Information Processing Centre (OPI) has published its latest report ‘Foreigners at universities in Poland’. This publication contains data for the academic year 2022/2023. It shows that Polish universities are becoming more popular every year. The report was funded by the Ministry of Education and Science.

“The internationalisation rate of higher education in our country was 7.1 % in the 2021/2022 academic year and 8.4 % in the 2022/2023 academic year, respectively. In absolute terms, there was an increase in the number of foreigners between the two years by as many as around 16,000 people – to over 102,000 people in the 2022/2023 academic year”, says Dr Jarosław Protasiewicz, director of the OPI.

Students from Ukraine are invariably represented in large numbers at universities in Poland. In the 2022/2023 academic year, they constituted a dominant group in both BA and MA studies and in uniform master’s programmes. The largest number of them decided to take up part-time studies at non-public universities.

In addition to Ukrainians, the number of students coming from Zimbabwe (+1 175 persons) and Turkey (+1 011 persons) increased the most. In contrast, the largest decreases were recorded for students from Nigeria (-451 persons), Russia (-273 persons) and Germany (-236 persons).

The largest number of foreigners in the 2022/2023 academic year was educated by a non-public higher education institution – the Vistula Academy of Finance and Business. Almost 6 000 foreign-born students took up studies there. This number represented more than half of all students at this university (56 %).

Arkadiusz Słomczyński