Let’s remember: since 2014, Polish student visas have been an easy ticket to Europe. A government audit of the visa system found that foreigners “abuse the overly easy recruitment process to study in Poland, and the real purpose of entry is to work or emigrate to other Schengen countries.”
According to official figures, over 321,000 people came to Poland to study in the space of a decade. Foreigners from almost 200 countries, including from as far away as Papua New Guinea and Tanzania, were not required by Polish universities to speak Polish, did not check their educational documents and often admitted them without any checks. And according to estimates by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, on average, every second student did not even make it to the second year of study.
A surprising decision
The new guidelines from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs aim to change this. What is surprising, however, is that they were issued at a time when most universities had already selected and accepted foreign candidates for studies.
– Normally, a foreign candidate is recruited for studies upon presentation of the documents required in the recruitment process. They are checked by the university, and the candidate receives confirmation that he has been conditionally admitted to study. Based on this, he applies for a visa. He receives it on time or late because the consulates are overloaded with work. Then he has a whole semester to have his high school diploma recognized by the school board. Now it turns out that something that candidates used to do after coming to study, already in Poland, and for which they had several months to wait for the board’s decision, will happen immediately – says Dr. Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska from SGH, president of the Academic Administration Forum Association.
He believes that the decision of the Foreign Ministry is very surprising. – After the visa scandal, we fully understand the need to tighten the system of issuing student visas, but at the moment collective responsibility is being used. According to the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all students applying to Polish universities will have to obtain recognition from the Polish school board within a few days. Often, applicants have already been conditionally recruited to Polish universities, have submitted visa documents or are about to submit them, and suddenly they find out that they still have to provide a document from the school board that is very difficult to obtain or even unattainable without coming to Poland, he says.
The student will not live to see this
From now on, it will be like this: an applicant from India or another distant country, in addition to meeting the existing requirements, such as obtaining an apostille (certification of a document), will have to translate his or her certificate into Polish. This means that it is necessary to send the original documents to Poland, because not all embassies cooperate with a sworn translator of the language of a particular country. Once the documents are translated, they will have to be submitted to the appropriate school board. Some of them have websites only in Polish, none of them serve customers online.
– All school boards are struggling with staff shortages and are overworked. It is hard to imagine that they will be able to cope with the next task if they are already struggling. If they are inundated with requests for recognition of school leaving certificates, they simply will not be able to cope in such a short time – warns Dr. Górak-Sosnowska.
And applicants will just have to wait for a response, which can take several weeks or even months. You may also need to fill out documents, so the waiting time will be even longer. Only when a person accepted to study at the university has all the documents will they be able to apply for a visa.
– Then the candidate, already accepted for studies, will wait again, this time for a response to the visa application. The wait will also be long, because the embassies have many other tasks. That is why many foreign students in recent years have come to the university a month after the start of the semester. He showed up in November and said: good morning, I came to the university. We said that the semester started a month ago. Yes, but I didn’t have a visa, he replied. And in many cases he didn’t come to Poland at all – explains Dr. Hab. Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska.
In his opinion, the new rules will mean that foreigners will receive a Polish visa long after the recruitment deadline. They will only be able to enter the next one in the next academic year. The effect is easy to predict: many of them will give up studying in Poland altogether. And at the same time, they will lose a year and will no longer be able to apply to universities in another country.
All in vain
– Universities have invested huge amounts of money in promoting their studies and recruiting foreign students. And although for now the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs applies only to some countries, a similar fate awaits students from other countries, most likely those outside the European Union and the OECD and those who have not signed appropriate agreements with Poland. Therefore, a massive outflow of foreign applicants for studies can be expected. Years of work by universities and other institutions to internationalize higher education may be wasted – worries Dr. Hab. Górak-Sosnowska.
He recalls that some technical, economic and medical universities open and offer courses in English with foreign students in mind. “Everything is already prepared, with a complete teaching staff, but the course will not be launched because there will be no one to study it,” he says.
And those who were accepted and received visas before August 12 will be sent away from the destination with a receipt. Moreover, it will not be possible to fill these places with other people, because, firstly, recruitment is often already over and, secondly, there are no formal reasons to “thank” foreign applicants now.
The decision to introduce new rules will primarily affect medical universities, because they have the largest number of foreign students. Polytechnics, universities and other public academic institutions will also suffer. The changes will also affect universities from the top ten of the latest ranking of private universities in Poland: the Vistula Academy of Finance and Business and the WSB University in Dąbrowa Górnicza.
Squaring the circle
However, experts point out that no act – neither the one on foreigners, nor the one on consular law, nor the one on the activity of consuls – provides for the need to include the decision of the superintendent of education among the formal requirements on which the student’s visa is determined. There is no such requirement in the EU directives implemented in the Polish legal system.
On July 1, a “round table” on the recruitment of foreign students was held, and ten days later, a consultation meeting “Studying in Poland”. Both meetings were attended not only by professionals involved in the recruitment of foreign students in universities, ministries and government agencies, but also by officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at various levels. And there were no announcements about changes in the recruitment system at that time.
However, the new rules are not just a practical problem: according to experts, the decision by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has created something that can be called a legal squaring of the circle. Because from now on, in order to get a visa, you need to have your certificate recognized, and in order to have your certificate recognized, you need to have a visa.
According to official data from the radon.nauka.gov.pl system, in 2022 more than 102,000 students studied in Poland. foreigners. In the 2023/2024 academic year, 3,021 Indian citizens studied in Poland, almost 3%. all foreigners.
The schengen.news portal, which was the first to report the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recalls that Poland is considered by many to be one of the best countries in the world to study. The costs of studying here are lower compared to other countries in the European Union, usually between 30 and 50 percent.
In May, Deputy Foreign Minister Henryka Mościcka-Dendys and Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and Administration Maciej Duszczyk presented the conclusions of the so-called “White Paper”, a document prepared by an inter-ministerial working group that diagnosed the causes of the so-called “visa scandal”. It also proposed systemic solutions aimed at eliminating irregularities in the visa issuance process, both for workers and students.
I would like to ask the Ministry of Foreign Affairs what the justification is for the sudden change in the guidelines on student visas. Has it consulted the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the universities that recruit foreign students? Which countries will be covered by the new regulation? Has the Ministry of Foreign Affairs taken into account its practical effects? For example, the fact that students will not be able to meet the new requirements and will drop out of studying in Poland?
I am sending a request to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education to comment on this matter.
We are still waiting for a response from both ministries.
