Today’s unlikely off-duty twitter thread is going to be related to some discoveries I’ve made in my Polish family archives , specifically regarding how education worked in communist Poland and something that was known as “punkty pochodzenia” — aka “points for class origin”.

The real expert in this topic appears to be Agata Zysiak (who I have reached out to to confirm the family version of things). https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/slh/article/view/slh.2044 as she explains the points for class origin were an important mechanism in the “democratization” of the Polish uni system.

As she notes the aim of the class origin points (which could also be reasonably described as privilege checks) “ was to make university education available on an unprecedented scale to people from the working and peasant classes.”

Unfortunately they also had a side effect: “the reform curtailed the autonomy of universities and increased censorship and political control”

Another important finding of Zysiak’s is that in the long run “these tools changed the students’ social backgrounds, albeit without permanently altering the general picture of higher education in Poland.”

So here is where the family anecdotes come in...

In my mother’s case (now deceased) her background was a middle class intelligentsia with sprinklings of lower nobility. (Caveat: The nobility thing is really not that exciting as almost everyone in Poland has some sort of connection to a noble crest. GoT it was not).

Nonetheless due to her background (grandparents were business owners or doctors etc) she always told me that when it came to higher education she effectively suffered from a negative points setback.

But by the time she was entering higher education in the 60s, the system has already been corrupted. The points equalization concept had become vulnerable to nepotism and bribery.

A key pathway to elite polish society back in the 60s was a degree from the “state school of central planning and statistics”. This has since become SGH, The Warsaw School of Economics, and remains very prestigious. Poland’s LSE so to speak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGH_Warsaw_School_of_Economics

To get in, however, if you were of privilege, meant gaming the system. The parents of those kids who couldn’t outperform to the extent they had to meritocratically due to the negative points set back often “negotiated” their way in for their kids.

My mother was aware of this, and was hence always extremely embarrassed of the degree she finally received in “foreign international trade” from the university. She believed it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

Not only was her position in the university most likely nothing to do with any meritocratic achievements, the toxic culture within the system discouraged learning. Besides her ambition was always to go to the west.

Once she finally arrived in London, she entered into bar work and eventually into receptionist work for years. She not once considered putting her Masters in International Trade on any CV. But it wasn’t just because she felt the degree was not properly achieved...

.. it was because her economics degree was focused on a central planning “gosplan” system and she believed that everything she has learned at uni was irrelevant in a free market system and would be disregarded by western employers anyway.

But she always noted this embarrassment didn’t stop many of her contemporaries, many of whom had also achieved similarly suspect qualifications, from touting them as super credible. Especially back in Poland. There the diplomas really did help open the doors to elite jobs.

The Gosplan nature of the economics she learned and the system’s heavy reliance on data about people’s personal tastes and desires coloured the stories she would tell me about the system’s overall ineffectiveness and have always influenced me.