ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the changes in higher education during the course of the nation's political transformation, providing an analytical foundation for research on the influences of political changes on higher education. Burton Clark's typology, applied to the Hungarian higher educational system, classifies it as a single public system with multiple sectors. The debates over the act reflect the dilemma of whether a law should determine the direction and substance of reform or whether it should regulate the broad framework of rights within which institutions and actors would have extended autonomy and power to participate in the higher education decisionmaking process. Understandably, the developmental program was a scientifically argued initiative to increase governmental support for higher education, since a reform of this scale would have required a considerable amount of money. Despite being inside the administration of higher education, he represented outsider values to the traditionally centralized administration.
