Values and Attitudes in the World of Higher Education

Abstract

The beginning of mass higher education in Hungary goes back to the 1990s, and as a consequence of this process great differences have arisen in the prestige of the institutions and faculties. The sample of our analysis is drawn from the higher educational institution having the largest number of students in Hungary, the University of Debrecen. In the course of our analysis three subsamples have been created by means of the university’s fifteen faculties (groups of students attending faculties of high, medium and low prestige), and in these subsamples the students’ value preferences, their expectations about higher education and their moral behaviour and principles within the institution have been mapped. In our analysis the 2012 database of HERD Research1) has been used. In the field of value preferences our results revealed, in a slightly surprising way, not the differences between the faculties of low and high prestige, but the medium group’s preferences rejecting peculiar material values, while concerning moral principles the looser norm system of the faculties of lower status could be observed, which was accompanied by material approach and, in a slightly surprising way, an image of elitist higher education.

Keywords

• Values
• Higher education
• Full time students
• Learning behavior