Poles make up one of the youngest nations in the EU. Almost 50% of the population is younger than 35 years old. Bearing in mind that there are more than 38m Poles it gives good prospects for labour market. Demographic trends show a further growth in the working-age population as can be seen from the graph below:
Source: Eurostat, 2007
There were 448 Higher Education Institutions in Poland in 2006/2007 and 1,941,400 students. There is a growing number of primary and secondary schools with English, German or French as a tuition language. Today there are 30 such schools in different Polish cities.
The number of students in Poland in comparison to other EU countries can be seen from the graph below:
Source: Eurostat, 2007
Polish students have achieved many successes in different fields during the last couple of years, mainly in computing and mathematics. They have come top in many international contests, such as TopCoders, International Olympics in Computer Science, Google Code Jam Europe, , Microsoft Imagine Cup 2007, ACM IBM 2007, European Investment Challenge Merril Lynch 2007, SAE Lockheed Martin 2007. The increasing trend in studying computer science is also visible in the number of students, which over the last 4 years has doubled and today amounts to around 60,000.
Among young people and in the business community English is the most popular foreign language.
The official language is Polish. It has the second largest number of speakers among Slavic languages after Russian.
There are also some native speakers of Polish in western Belarus and Ukraine, as well as in eastern Lithuania. Because of emigration from Poland in various periods, millions of Polish-speakers may be found in countries such as Ireland, Australia, Israel, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, United States, etc. The estimated number of Poles who live beyond the borders of Poland is 10 million.
