The new academic year in Poland may bring a myriad of new courses of studies to pursue, as universities are finally responding to needs on the country’s labour market, writes Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

In the forthcoming fall semester students will be able to opt for eco-physics, nuclear energy, interactive marketing, and even get a diploma in operating LNG terminals. Institutions of higher education, especially the private facilities, seek to escape the image of schools that spawn useless management and marketing graduates, thus launching courses that would later guarantee employment. The race is on as with the demographic low expected to result in a drop of the number of students by a third in just four years, the students will be able to pick and choose from the attractive offer of courses, the paper concludes.

Poland will lose over 800,000 people in their productive age by 2015, warns Gazeta Wyborcza, in an article on the opening of the German, Austrian and Swiss labour markets for Central and Eastern EU member states on 1 May. Poland, struggling with the all-European problem of aging societies and a generation of a demographic low entering the workforce, awaits another emigration wave which could contribute to vast labour shortages in several years. Migration aggravates the demographic crisis in Central Europe, said Paweł Maciejewicz, from the Center of Migration Research at the Warsaw University, who added that the opening of the German market will show whether Poland is a country of outbound migration. Maybe with the growing pressure on the labour market employers will provide better conditions, thus preventing a brain drain, the paper muses.

Gazeta Wyborcza continues by stating that Poland’s law enforcement authorities are far too casual in reaching for our itemized telephone bills, with warnings coming from the European Commission in the matter. In the Czech Republic, France or Great Britain personal data is processed three times less frequently than in Poland, and in Germany – 35 times less. Only this year have Polish authorities accessed personal telecommunications data 1.3 million times. The EC is publishing a report on the implementation of the directive on the protection of data across Europe today.

Rzeczpospolita laments the prevalence of vulgarisms among the Polish society, no longer playing the role of mere commas as they increasingly replace neutral phrases and accrue new meanings, writes the paper. A team of academics carried out a six-month research aimed at creating a comprehensive compendium of “real-life Polish”, as they combed through youtube films, and eavesdropped on private conversations on city streets. Their study has shown that the Polish language is becoming impoverished. “If any thought can be expressed with the use of four swearwords, then maybe it’s time to be concerned,” muses linguist Michał Grech, from the Wrocław University in southwestern Poland. While Poles have proved to be very creative in adding new meaning to vulgarisms, the sad truth is that cursing in public has become very common, also among Polish intellectuals. The paper cites statistics from 2007, which show that 67 percent of the society is very often exposed to swearwords, while 62 claimed they are shouting obscenities under the influence of strong emotions, be they negative or positive. (aba/jb)