Secondary education is provided free of charge to candidates who successfully complete the entrance examination. Vocational technical schools provide five-year courses of general education together with vocational training. This type of schooling can lead to qualifying for entering post-secondary higher educational institutions. In the 1990-1991 academic year there were 96 higher educational establishments in Poland, that included 11 universities and 18 technical institutions. One hundred and ten institutions offer post secondary education for 495,000 Polish people and three quarters of them are full-time students.
Women constitute half of the student population.
Teacher training colleges, agricultural and medical schools are less popular than universities and technical schools. Universities in Poland constitute a separate group among the units of higher education. Disciplines such as medicine, the arts, trade, agriculture, and technology are developed in separate establishments of higher education. In Poland there are more than ninety institutes of higher education including eleven universities. Except for few, all of the schools are state run institutions.