Peculiarities of higher education in Hungary at the beginning of the XX century: geographical and regional aspects

The article dеаls with the problem of the relationship between the regional features of the placement of social institutions in Hungary and the availability of higher education for the population of a multinational country at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries in the period of the entry of Hungary into the Austro-Hungarian Empire and before the start of the First World War. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to study the peculiarities and causes of the geographic-regional aspect of the structure of Hungarian higher education institutions prior to the First World War. The research was conducted by analyzing scientific sources, statistical data on the number of institutions of higher education, the number of students studying in them and certain aspects of their nationality, the most popular specialties, language of instruction. By comparing the data obtained with the peculiarities of social and economic processes in society until 1914, the conclusions were formulated. Institutions of higher education in the early twentieth century were divided into three large groups, namely, universities, law academies (or law colleges) and theological (theological) college. In 1900, Hungary had almost two large centers of higher education – Budapest and Cluj, where there were three institutions of higher education. In addition to universities, there were royal and religious law academies in the country, in which the training of lawyers was carried out at a low level; there were other types of higher education institutions, but the number of students in them was insignificant. At the Royal University in the city of Zagreb (Croatian-Serbian region of Hungary) up to the First World War, about a thousand people studied). The analysis of the nationality of students of this university points to the regional-geographical orientation of the distribution of students according to their native language. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the beginning of the First World War, the number of students in institutions of higher education constantly increased, due to economic and social growth, as well as a demographic explosion at the end of the XIX century. However, the beginning of the twentieth century, was characterized by the preservation of the uneven regional distribution of students in Hungarian higher education institutions: in 1900, 63% of students studied in two institutions of higher education in Budapest. The situation changed in 1912, when two universities were opened in Debrecen and Bratislava.