AI Programs Among the Most Sought-After in Polish University Admissions

Politechnika Śląska (the Silesian University of Technology) announced its admissions results for this academic year on Friday, July 17, and two of the nine most oversubscribed programs turned out to be artificial intelligence courses. It's part of a nationwide trend also confirmed by an analysis from the PulsHR portal, which found that applicant numbers for AI programs across Poland run as high as four times the number of available places.

Admissions at Politechnika Śląska ran from June 1 to July 6. The results, published at noon on July 17, confirm that applicants are increasingly turning away from traditional engineering programs in favor of those tied to new technologies. Alongside civil engineering, automation and robotics, transport, aerospace engineering, and computer science, two programs dedicated to artificial intelligence, "Artificial Intelligence" and "Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence", made the list of the most popular choices.

A new lineup of programs

Both AI programs are part of four new additions Politechnika Śląska introduced for the 2026/2027 academic year, alongside a program in systems engineering for defense applications. The university also expanded its overall pool of places to more than 9,500 across 63 degree programs, citing growing applicant interest in technology-focused fields.

Applicants are increasingly choosing programs that respond to the challenges of digital transformation, the development of artificial intelligence, and modern industry - Politechnika Śląska statement

The university has not yet released the exact ratio of applicants per place for the two AI programs, noting that final admission limits are adjusted depending on the level of interest in each field. A second round of admissions for remaining places will run from July 24 to August 31.

A nationwide pattern

What's happening in Gliwice isn't an isolated case. According to the PulsHR analysis, programs labeled "artificial intelligence" are setting popularity records across Poland this year, with applicants outnumbering places by an average of four to one. Students in these programs are expected to build skills ranging from programming and advanced mathematics to data analysis and machine learning, up to the design of advanced intelligent systems.

A similar pattern emerged earlier at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, where a new AI program with a cap of 56 places drew 259 applications. The university as a whole logged nearly 5,500 applications this year, more than a third more than the year before. Related fields at Polish technical universities are seeing similarly strong interest, automation and robotics and electrical engineering among them, where applicants outnumber places by more than three to one.

What it means for the job market

The influx of applicants into AI programs coincides with economists' warnings about automation putting jobs at risk. Polski Instytut Ekonomiczny (the Polish Economic Institute) and the International Monetary Fund recently estimated that artificial intelligence could threaten as many as 5.5 million jobs in Poland over the next decade. The growing interest in AI-related engineering degrees can be read as a response from applicants who want to end up on the side building and deploying these technologies, rather than the side hit hardest by automation.

Tech companies in Poland have been signaling a shortage of AI specialists for months, and salaries in this segment are climbing faster than in the rest of the IT sector, some offers for experienced AI specialists already reach 50,000 zloty a month. That's an added incentive for high school graduates choosing a field of study amid uncertainty about the future of many other professions.

Technical universities are responding to this demand by expanding their offerings, besides Politechnika Śląska and ZUT (West Pomeranian University of Technology), other academic centers across the country are also launching new AI-related programs this year. At the same time, labor market experts point out that the sheer number of AI program graduates won't solve the problem if curricula fail to keep pace with the speed of change in the technology itself.

The second round of admissions at Politechnika Śląska, covering places left open after the first intake, will run through the end of August. Only once it concludes will it be possible to assess whether this year's record interest in AI programs translates into a comparable rise in the number of students who actually begin classes in October.