Knowledge Brokers in the Heart of Europe: International Student and Faculty Mobility in Hungarian Higher Education

Abstract

Until the late 1980s a Soviet-type interpretation of internationalization was used in Hungary, which isolated countries of the communist bloc within the Iron Curtain. In 1993, after the democratic transformation, a new Higher Education Act was passed. Although the first democratic government started to replace the old type of higher education policy with a European one, the internationalization process progressed slowly. Hungarian education policy puts a special emphasis on internationalization strategies based mainly on the encouragement of individual mobility. However, the socio-economic disadvantages of Hungarian population compared to Western Europeans reduce the efficiency of these endeavors. This paper describes four aspects of higher education internationalization in Hungary drawing from a review of prior research and analysis of survey data: 1) the political and institutional context of higher education internationalization in Hungary; 2) the mobility of Hungarian faculty and researchers; 3) the outbound mobility of Hungarian students; and 4) incoming student mobility to Hungarian universities. Our paper is a significant contribution to the literature, because (1) we use the actorcentered approach of internationalization (2) we not only analyze national and international statistics, but also we drew our conclusions from original survey data, that is we are able to summarize the individual motives and obstacles as well.

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