According to Bianka Siwinska, editor-in-chief of the Polish higher education magazine Perspektywy, Poland has the region’s biggest proportion of higher education students enrolled in the private sector, at 32 percent. In the Czech Republic the figure is 14 percent — private sector enrollment soared to 57,000 from 2,000 in the decade to 2010.

Yet a combination of demographics, recession and concerns over quality may be about to invert the trend. Many schools across the region could close over the next several years, education experts warn. In Poland, some predictions suggest that up to 75 percent of private universities may close while in Ukraine, home to more than 100 private institutions, that number may drop 80 percent, according to Ms. Siwinska.

“There is an estimate that each month, at least one private institution in Poland is being closed because of lack of students,” said Jan Sadlak, president of the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, an international nonprofit association registered in Brussels, with its secretariat in Warsaw. “Generally speaking, the good times for private higher education in Central and Eastern Europe are over.”

Those good times really boomed in the 1990’s and 2000’s, when thousands of schools opened across the region.

“It was part of this new capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic, a higher education consultant and former head of Unesco’s higher education section. “There was this new freedom to try things in a different way and they mushroomed everywhere.”

While some of those institutions have become exemplary, others turned out to be short-term business ventures, peddling low-cost diplomas.

“A lot of these universities and academic institutions were created in a very short period of time,” said Ms. Siwinska, “and most of them were not very good.”