EMPLOYABILITY ISSUES AND TRENDS IN ARTISTIC HIGHER EDUCATION. CASE STUDY FROM POLAND

Currently, artistic higher schools in Poland educate yearly ca. 16 000 students and employ almost 6 000 employees, including almost 4 000 academic teachers. At the moment, like other Polish universities, they have to deal with increasing expectations to improve their quality of teaching, which has to be done in limited financial conditions. Artistic schools are also subject to dramatic changes, in particular the redefinition of the role that they play in contemporary societies and economies. They also have to answer the questions of stakeholders as to how they educate and whether their ways of teaching make graduates find themselves in the labour market. The employability of higher schools’ graduates has become a notion that is interesting not only for economists and social policy makers but has also become part of the quality discourse in higher education, artistic education included.

The research problem that we are taking up concerns the ways in which artistic higher schools address the employability of their graduates, the needs that they identify as well as their actions as they are recognized by other participants of the artistic labour market – the graduates themselves and their employers. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify and assess the trends connected to the employability of Poland’s artistic higher schools’ graduates, as it is seen from the point of view of those who manage artistic higher schools, of employers and of the graduates who have already entered the labour market.

The paper was prepared on the basis of studies that had been conducted between 2016 and 2018 in 15 (out of the 19 existing) artistic higher schools in Poland. It was assumed that the researched higher schools would make up one case study within which we would use mixed research methods, both qualitative and quantitative.

We have conducted:
• Individual interviews with the three groups of artistic higher schools’ stakeholders: graduates (28 in-depth interviews conducted in 2016); managers of artistic higher schools (10 in-depth interviews conducted in 2016) and employers who employed graduates of artistic schools (28 in-depth interviews with representatives of public organizations, NGOs and companies);
• Focus interviews with the management staff (rectors, chancellors) of artistic higher schools in Poland, conducted in 2016 and 2017;
• CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interviewing) surveys, conducted every year between 2016 and 2018 with graduates of artistic higher schools (surveys of ca. 2500 graduates from years 2012-2017 were analysed).