The Future of Education

The government of Hungary started an allover structural change in the Hungarian higher education system in 2011. One of the primary goals was the intention to restructure the fields of studies, namely to increase the number of students in the fields of technology and IT, and to have less students in the fields of law and economics. On the other hand, “the restorement of the honor of manual labor” was announced as a policy and thus resetting the priorities of different educational levels. In an earlier study, student reflections were examined where we found that the number of students significantly dropped, while the targeted restructuring did not take place. The current paper focuses on higher education institutions’ behaviors with the means of statistical analysis of officially published national data on applications, admissions and on the minimum BSc level entering scores of several Hungarian universities. From the data one can see that the limited institutional adaption to the governmental policy may have also taken part in the failed restructuring. Higher education institutions (in average) raised their minimum entering scores at fields of IT, technology and natural sciences, which despite the governmental aim to increase the number of students at these fields, turned to the opposite (except for IT, where some increase was experienced by the end of the examined period). This score-raising pattern was also visible at the examined universities’ economics and law programs, which is also an awkward phenomenon since these fields lost most students due to reforms. Hungarian universities (in average) just like the applicants seemed to follow their own enrolment policies irrespective of or even contrary to the governmental aims. That is, if neither potential students, nor higher education institutions correspond to a reform policy, that can hardly reach its full target.

Keywords: higher education institutional behaviour, enrolment, entering scores;