Gabriella Pusztai

The Bologna Process as a Trojan Horse: Restructuring Higher Education in Hungary.

Changes in higher education in Hungary are strongly related to those in the economic and social environment. Since the change of the political system in the late 1980s, Hungarian economic development has been marked by periods of contraction and expansion. Notwithstanding this process, influenced in part by the state’s imposition of restrictive policies to control economic growth, the need for higher education has continually grown. The number of tertiary students increased fourfold between 1990 and 2003, and the student–teacher ratio increased from 5.9 to 16.5—more than two and a half times. By 2005 more than 40 percent of the appropriate age group participated in higher education. In Hungary these processes—such as growing needs and fewer resources—occurred within a decade and simultaneously, while the same processes were consecutive and lasted for a longer time in the West. Since other significant issues of higher educational policy remained

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

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.

What is your Kozma Number? – An academic career in the light of co-author networks

When celebrating an acknowledged education researcher’s birthday, we usually make a lengthy enumeration of their research projects, volumes, positions, prizes and other instances of their professional achievement. Birthdays actually serve as occasions for collecting them, just as we compiled the bibliography of Tamás Kozma’s works for his 70th birthday (Nagy-Baló, Varga Kovács & Kozmáné, 2009). Now, however, we would like to celebrate his 75th birthday in a non-traditional way. As he is a very prolific author, his collected bibliography is likely to be published again in electronic or printed form. It would be redundant to summarize his life story and his extensive work experience after he published his autobiography titled Erdei séta (A Walk in the Forest), which gives a picture of the events of his life against a colourful cultural background, making it a valuable piece of reading also as a source of the history and sociology of social science (Kozma, 2011). Trying to avoid cliches, we are going to greet him in a special way.