In February 2024, Poland’s Anti-Corruption Bureau opened an investigation into the ‘Collegium Humanum Warsaw Management University’, a ‘Private Management School’ opened in 2018 by a man now (for legal reasons) referred to only as Paweł C. That same month, Paweł C was detained by the Public Prosecutor’s Office on suspicion of issuing diplomas in exchange for personal financial gain. Today, the desire for the appearance of wisdom is often greater than the desire for wisdom itself.
Poland has an interesting relationship with academic credentials.
The Collegium Humanum website boasts of offering ‘prestigious degrees’, including cut-price three-month MBA programmes marketing themselves with the words ‘save 6,200 zlotys and almost a year of studies’. A political scandal has emerged in Poland centred around the fast-tracking of nominees for the boards of state-run companies with the use of the Collegium Humanum three-month MBA.
The ACB investigation has also revealed that the Collegium Humanum offered degrees for other programmes which involved no classes or examinations at all, and put on online examinations without demanding proof of identity. (Nobody has yet been accused of buying a diploma outright.) The ACB has also questioned the Director of the Polish Accreditation Committee. They say that he requested and received 450,000 zlotys (£90,000) for the accreditation of the Collegium Humanum.
The background to this story is a 2016 regulation stipulating that each candidate for a seat on the ‘supervisory board’ of a state-run company should have some combination of a series of credentials – usually a mix of an academic degree, a professional qualification (like in accounting), an MBA diploma, or a result in one of the state examinations offered to candidates for the boards of state-run enterprises. Prior to this reform, the state examination was required for all but those holding PhDs in law or economics, or those holding professional qualifications in certain subjects. But following it, the fast-track MBA became the preferred route to plum positions on state company boards.A later deregulation of postgraduate education removed government oversight over the content of postgraduate degrees, and placed it in the hands of individual institutions.
In the UK, MBA diplomas are regulated and accredited similarly to masters degrees, but in Poland, MBA studies can be administered like postgraduate diplomas. This means that the many excellent institutions in Poland offering standard 2-year MBAs – including public ones like the Warsaw School of Economics, and private Business Schools such as Koźmiński University, which enrols a total of around 8,000 students – have been joined by… other options. Collegium Humanum had a student body of some 25,000 while employing around 80 members of academic staff.
Poland has an interesting relationship with academic credentials. Unlike in the UK, almost all students take masters degrees, and many go on to PhD studies as well. Where in the UK it may well be the name of the University which opens doors, in Poland it is the possession of the credential itself which matters. Polish society suffers from a kind of credential inflation – and after the transition to a free-market economy in the 1990s, the country combined its pursuit of a Western-style capitalist dream with a traditional respect for academic diplomas – giving rise to a love affair with the MBA. At the same time, the old, post-communist mistrust of the establishment, and lack of faith that systems could ever deliver for individuals, still haunts Poland today.
The Collegium Humanum scandal is particularly embarrassing for Poland’s previous government, which prided itself on standing up to the influence of the elites in the interests of the ordinary voter, while passing reforms which appear to have offered fast-tracked access to state company boards. Every level of government is affected, with Collegium Humanum diplomas popping up on the CVs of local councillors from almost every party across Poland. The brother of the former head of state-run energy company Orlen (and Director of the State Forests Office in Gdansk) Bartłomiej Obajtek is also on the list of notable people who received diplomas from the Collegium Humanum, as is Antoni Duda – director of Poland’s state railway cargo company, and uncle to Poland’s President.
The scandal has an international dimension too, as Collegium Humanum diplomas were allegedly accredited by partner institutions abroad. International partnerships appear to have been part of a wider branding campaign which also included wooing celebrities and sports stars with degrees, and securing top places in newspaper rankings published by titles owned by Polska Press (acquired by Orlen in 2020). On 27 March, the Polish government placed a moratorium on recommending candidates with a Collegium Humanum diploma for state-run company boards, and on 8 April the Minister of Education froze the institution’s access to 18 million zlotys (£3.6 million) in state scholarships – so a swift crackdown is on the horizon.
The example of Collegium Humanum looks extreme in its naked opportunism, but it would seem to point to a broader problem of over-reliance on credentials as a proxy for skill, and the blurring of the lines between academic accreditation (useful as that can be) and business acumen. Only the truly skilled will be able to find a way out of this crisis.
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