Poland’s traditions of academic education go back to 1364, when King Casimir the Great established the Cracow Academy, known today as Jagiellonian University. The Cracow Academy, one of the oldest in the world, took after academies in Bologna and Padua, and was the second university in Central Europe after the school in Prague. Around two centuries later, in 1579, King Stefan Batory transformed the existing Jesuit College in Vilnius into the Vilnius Academy, and in 1661 John Casimir, King of Poland, converted the Jesuite College in Lviv into the Lviv Academy. Thus, by the end of the 17th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had three flourishing universities, providing academic education to both national and international students.

Today, the Polish higher education system is developing dynamically. Poland holds the fourth place in Europe (after the United Kingdom, Germany and France) in terms of the number of people enrolled in higher education. The total student population, at over 450 university-level schools, is almost 2 million. Each year, almost half a million young people begin their learning at higher education institutions here. Polish university-level schools offer over 200 first-rate fields of study as an integral part of the European Higher Education Area. Most higher education institutions also offer their courses in foreign languages.