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In the European Union education is the responsibility of Member States; European Union institutions play a supporting role. According to Art. 165 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the Community The EU also funds educational, vocational and citizenship-building programmes which encourage EU citizens to take advantage of opportunities which the EU offers its citizens to live, study and work in other countries. The best known of these is the Erasmus programme, under which more than 2,000,000 students have taken part in inter-university exchange and mobility over the last 20 years.Since 2000, conscious of the importance of Education and Training for their economic and social objectives, EU Member States have begun working together to achieve a set of 13 specific goals in the field of Education. This is referred to as the Education and Training 2010 programme. By sharing examples of good policy practice, by taking part in Peer Learning activities, by setting benchmarks and by tracking progress against key indicators, the 27 Member States aim to respond coherently to common challenges, whilst retaining their individual sovereignty in the field of Education policy.The European Union is also a partner in various inter-governmental projects, including the Bologna Process whose purpose is to create a European higher education area by harmonising academic degree structures and standards as well as academic quality assurance standards throughout EU Member States and in other European countries.

The purpose of this article was to examine the underlying factors behind the choices that Polish students make while pursuing their tertiary education. The research method that combines focus groups' discussions and a survey study among 1,420 business major students helped us to identify the factors behind three phases of the decision making process: pursuing higher education; information search along with final choice of a university; and satisfaction from chosen studies. Our research implies that decision making with regard to tertiary education is multifaceted and longitudinal as it combines a different set of factors in each stage of the decision making process.