The purpose of this paper is to establish what sociodemographic and institutional factors cause students to drop out, become uncertain about their intentions to obtain a degree, or confidently advance towards the fulfilment of their ambitions. Our analysis is based on the combined databases of large-sample questionnaire surveys carried out among former students who dropped out from higher education institutions in an eastern region of Hungary as well as those carried out among current students. In addition to bivariate methods, we conduct multinomial logistic regression analysis to explore how students’ gender, social background, the funding of their training, willingness to do paid work alongside their studies, and relationships with academic staff and fellow students affect the chance of dropout, the risk of dropout, and persistence. In contrast to previous studies, which have mostly identified those at risk of dropping out of higher education and have primarily focused on the deficiencies of institutional integration, our novel results show that the actual dropout rate is at least as influenced by students’ unfavourable social background as it is by institutional factors.

The impact of a family’s socio-economic status on parenting activities has been a thoroughly researched topic. Parental involvement, which refers to parenting that supports school achievement, may be home-based and school-based, as typified by Epstein and Sanders. Earlier findings suggest that a more favorable socioeconomic status results in more active and effective parental involvement. Only a few studies show low-status parents can be more effective, whereby some factor compensates for the negative impact of low status. Our hypothesis is that parents’ self-identified religiosity can reduce the disadvantages arising from the family’s unfavorable socio-economic status. We use data from a survey conducted in 2020 among the parents of fourth-grade Hungarian primary school children, which is geographically and socially representative with a sample size of 1156. Our results show that religiosity has a significant positive influence on parenting activities and their perceived effectiveness, even after controlling for other variables. In addition, our indicator of home-based parental attention in itself is also strongly supportive of parents’ perceived effectiveness in parenting. Our findings suggest that parental religiosity and home-based parental attention are important factors that can make parenting effective despite social and cultural disadvantages.

The interpretation of the phenomenon of student dropout, which represents a waste of a relatively large proportion of human and material capital in the social, individual and institutional domain, is impossible without examining dropout students. In this study, we analysed the DEPART 2018 database, which contains data from 605 Hungarian dropout students. We tried to identify higher education dropout scenarios and pointed out that higher educational dropout is a complex phenomenon. Based on the students' reports on their interpretation and evaluation of their dropouts, four student clusters were created. We compared the groups with their socio-cultural background and their decision to drop out from higher education, and their assessment of that decision. The most important result of the study is that it identifies a new group in addition to the international dropout types, and provides a detailed picture that calls our attention to the diversity of dropout groups, thereby moving beyond the over-generalised image of the dropout student.

In the literature on higher education, civic involvement is discussed in connection with civic education or as a protective factor against attrition. In a series of surveys, we have followed higher education students' volunteering at several higher education institutions of Central and Eastern Europe since 2005. Based on Wilson (2000), we distinguish between formal volunteering and volunteer work which does not require organizational membership. Among young people, volunteer work is rather a program-centered, personally motivated, and individual activity (Inglehart 2003). In this study, however, we also examine students' voluntary group membership, which could provide a potential framework for volunteer work. Through a stepwise linear regression model, we analyze the effect of volunteering and voluntary group membership on students' higher education persistence. The analysis is carried out on data from the PERSIST 2019 survey (N = 2199). We find that persistent academic progress is more common among women, individually well-off students from objectively less affluent families, those who pray regularly, those who have a close relationship with their parents, professors, and peers, and those have done volunteer work during their higher education studies.

In this study, we examine the features of school choice by comparing parental involvement between denominational and public schools. In Hungary, denominational schools reemerged after the fall of communism in 1989, and their share increased further after 2010. The survey data, we employ, refer to primary school children’s parents and were focused on parental involvement at home and at school. Our hypothesis is based on the work of Epstein and Coleman and suggests a prominent role for denominational schools in parental involvement. However, our results show that Hungarian denominational schools differ in terms of parental involvement and school choice from what theory or practice in other western countries suggests. School choice of Hungarian parents is primarily driven by the intention to ensure a more culturally and economically homogeneous and safer environment for their children. Parental involvement tends to be stronger at home and at school due to higher parental religiosity, regardless of the school sector. The novelty of our findings is, that opposite to the literature, mostly not the school type but parents’ religiosity increase both the home based and the school based parental involvement.

Based on several studies, after exiting higher education there are serious gender differences in the labor market, and disadvantages of people with worse social background also exist. Research question of this study is whether such inequalities in students’ persistence also exist, or not. Based on a survey (n = 2199) conducted in a region of Central and Eastern Europe, we use cluster analysis to characterize resilient students (with unfavorable social backgrounds and good performances), and carry out stepwise linear regression to reveal the effects on students’ persistence. We found that persistence is not the highest among resilient students, as presumed. They still cannot break through the glass ceiling set by students from better social backgrounds in relation to persistence. In accordance with the previous research results, however, females’ higher persistence can still be shown, despite their less favorable social background.