Although efforts were made to establish several higher education institutes in the
Medieval era, Hungarian higher education began in 1635 when the first university,
which is still in operation today, was founded. For the first one hundred and fifty
years the university was under the influence of the church, then under Absolutism,
it came under the rule of the Crown. The period between the last decades of
the 19th century and World War I is considered the golden era of autonomy in
Hungarian higher education, although the influence of the government was significant.
After World War I the universities’ autonomy decreased, and by the end of World War
II, it had completely disappeared. The change came just before 1990 when the collapse
of Soviet rule led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the early 1990s, the first independent
and general Higher Education Act established the ‘Humboldt model’ in Hungary. However,
this was only in place for three years. Over the past twenty years, we have seen the
autonomy of Hungarian higher education and its institutions slowly decrease. This
study discusses the past thirty years and aims to understand the reasons for the failure
of the autonomy experiment.
Keywords: state control, HEI management, financial and educational efficiency of HEIs,
history of Hungarian higher education’s autonomy
