Comparing my Experience to the Experience of College Students in Communist Poland

After reading about the university experiences of young students in Communist Poland I realized how different my experience was to theirs. I was able to find some similarities; however, the American experience of today is not quite so drastic. What primarily struck me about this excerpt was the selection process for admission into the Polish Universities. Your admission depended almost entirely on your social category regardless of knowledge and skill. The author states, “Now they were told that the enrollment procedure at universities and polytechnics gave priority to the sons and daughters of workers, regardless of their actual knowledge or abilities. This was called the principle of historical justice” (116). Following the children of workers were the children of peasant farmers but not the children of richer farmers because they owned too many hectares of land which did not coincide with the values of Communism. A student’s whole family tree was examined before admission was granted to make sure candidates from incorrect origin were eliminated. In America, a student’s credentials such as GPA, SAT scores, national honors society, sports, community service, and club membership are all taken into consideration when deciding whether a student should be admitted to a university or not. A student gets to choose which universities to apply to and once accepted which university to go to. The ability to choose is not a luxury college students enjoyed in communist Poland. I do believe, however, that social classes still play a role in the college admission process today in America. Schools can be very costly and typically private schools cost more than public schools. Certain schools attract middle class and upper class students based on the high cost of tuition. It is not uncommon for students to receive financial aid but in the more expensive universities a large number of students have similar social backgrounds. Admissions representatives may not examine an applicant’s entire family tree but they do still have an agenda. On a supplement application I had to fill out during my senior fall I was asked how much my parents were willing to gift to the school and how much my grandparents were willing to gift to the school. Questions such as these on applications shows that financial status does play a role in the admissions process even if it is minimal.
Another part of this excerpt that caught my attention concerned libraries and textbooks. The author states, “The situation was further aggravated by the fact that libraries had been destroyed during the war, and the intentional isolation of communist countries from the rest of the world resulted in a lack of modern teaching materials and excluded academic circles from the normal international circulation of ideas” (128). I go to school in the age of globalization and to me it seems quite challenging to study a subject without the comprehensive amount of resources available to me. Relying on lectures and the few old text books that survived the war hinders the learning process especially since Poland was left out of academic circles throughout the rest of the world. New ideas and technologies were not available to them. In that sense there are no similarities between the experiences of the college students in Poland and my experience.