Description: The paper discusses changing higher education, pensions and health care systems in Poland in a wider context of the changing welfare state under internal and external pressures. The author raises the issue to what extent the renegotiation of the foundations of the Western European welfare states has been caused by globalization; to what extent transformations in education need to be linked to a more general issue of transformations of the state. In the case of higher education, current transformations are linked to two dimensions of the modern state: welfare state and nation-state - but in the case of the two other public services, current transformations are linked to one dimension only: reformulation of the welfare state in general. The paper raises the problem of the global convergence of national policies in education, pensions and health care and discusses the problem of global views on the future of both the state and the public sector and its services as presented by e.g. the World Bank and as implemented e.g. in Poland in the late-1990s reform of the health care sector and pensions sector (multi-pillar system replacing the pay-as-you-go traditional system). Although the paper mostly reports the research the author has done in the field of education in recent years, it moves, using the same theoretical context, towards the other two public services. Methodology: Global (WB, OECD) and European (European Commission) views on higher education; literature on their views on the welfare state; literature on welfare state vs. Globalization; literature on postcommunist transition in pubic services. Conclusions: The future of the welfare state in its traditional European forms, and its services, including public higher education, looks roughly similar all over Europe. Unfortunately, most lines of argumentation point in the same direction, even though the concepts used may be different. The story gets even more homogenous if we leave the domain of "affluent" democracies which have inherited their welfare provisions from the "Golden age" and pass on to most developing countries and the European transition countries. In the context of CEE countries, many discussions about welfare futures seem academic: what they shyly predict for affluent democracies is in fact already happening in transition economies. There is certainly a lot of social experimentation with respect to welfare going on in the transition countries. It could even be argued that the future directions of welfare transformations in Western democracies are being experimented with to various degrees of success in transition countries; in some areas, like pensions reform with the three-pillar model designed by the World Bank and applied in some Latin American and European transition countries, this intention even happens to be formulated explicitly. Nowadays, as the reduction of the welfare state in general progresses smoothly (and mostly in an unnoticeable manner e.g. through new legislation) in most parts of the world, social contracts with regards to most areas of state benefits and state-funded services may have to be renegotiated, significantly changing their content. Higher education, healthcare and pensions systems are being experimented with, both in theory and in practice. The end-products of these experimentations in transition economies are still largely hard to predict.