No Coming Back: Polish and Ukrainian Youth on Conveyor Belt to the West

With hundreds of thousands of young Poles fleeing to Western Europe for education and work opportunities, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have come to Polish educational institutions to take their place.

Earlier this month, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski proudly noted that there are now over 23,000 Ukrainians studying in Polish colleges and universities, their numbers almost doubling over the past year. According to Polish education fund Perspektywy, Ukrainians now make up over half of all foreign students in the country. Comprising less than 5,000 between 2012-2013, their numbers jumped to over 10,000 between 2013-2014 before reaching over 23,300 today.

Behind these cheery figures is a stark reality, recently reported on by Polish media, that the country's institutions of higher learning have been losing tens of thousands of students to Western European schools. Ukraine's Korrespondent magazine has explained that Poland expects over 700,000 of its young minds to choose foreign schools over the next five years.

Leaving a physical and budgetary void in the country's education system, Polish universities and colleges have responded by reducing the price of education for foreigners. With Ukrainian authorities recently announcing a price hike of 20-30 percent in the cost of post-secondary education, Polish institutions have been doing the opposite, offering heavy discounts to Ukrainians of up to 50 percent, along with a number of free programs and even stipends.

Korrespondent has explained that Ukrainians choosing to study in Poland cite low prices, a lack of corruption in the school system, the ease of picking up the Polish language, and most importantly, the prospect of studying and living in an EU country.

Peter Gorbatovsky, a Professor at the Center for Polish Language and Culture at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, told Ukraine's Vesti that if in the past most of the Ukrainians studying in Poland had Polish roots, the new wave of students come to Poland "because they want to study in the EU."

Ukrainian experts and education officials believe that the vast majority of Ukrainians who go to study in Poland will not return to Ukraine following graduation. Oles Obertas, a tutor preparing Ukrainian students for study in Poland, told Korrespondent that to date, none of the students he has assisted have returned to Ukraine. Alexander Posdnyakov, director of Eurostudy, a program helping Ukrainians find schools in Poland, told the magazine that a full 80 percent of students graduating from Polish schools do not return to Ukraine, settling in Poland or moving to other European countries.

Ukraine's Loss Not Necessarily Poland's Gain

But if Ukraine's loss may at first appear to be Poland's gain, the reality is more complicated, with many Ukrainian students either hinting or stating openly that they plan to move further West once they receive their EU approved degree. Speaking to Korrespondent, a young man named Alexander noted that "in Poland I can receive a European diploma; this will give me more opportunities, and in the future I plan to work in Europe." Yulia, a 24-year-old historian archivist masters student, noted that "finding  work in Poland isn't easy," and that while she was optimistic, she knows classmates who never managed to find work in all their time in the country.

And even if conditions in Poland are unquestionably better than in Ukraine, where political and economic instability and the civil war in the east have resulted in hundreds of thousands looking to escape the country, work opportunities remain hard to come by. That's because ethnic Poles face difficulties in finding work in their own country themselves. Western Europeans know all too well the phenomenon of Poles, many of them highly educated, immigrating to their countries in search of work. Poland presently faces a national unemployment rate between 10-13 percent, the figure reaching more than 20 percent in some cities and regions.

Yaryna, an economics student studying in the city of Wroclaw, is worried about her prospects, telling Vesti: "In a year I will graduate, but I have no clue where I will go from there. My European diploma is not a guarantee of employment. Right now I'm working part time in a supermarket, but I have no idea what will happen next. It's difficult to even intern at the prestigious firms. And most of the people that get hired are Poles and people with experience."