Description: Present paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of the private tutoring (PT) in Croatian secondary education. PT is defined as an additional tuition in school subjects that is being paid for. Secondary school teachers, students, university lecturers or other professionals in Croatia provide tuition both to individuals or groups. Preparatory courses for university entrance exams are, in this study, also considered to be a form of private tutoring. These courses are usually organised in the spring of the finishing year of secondary education and can be viewed as an indicator and a generator of the inequalities in the specific educational setting. The present paper is a part of the larger study which is the first attempt of the systematic research into the PT phenomena in Croatian secondary education. The scope, nature and effects of PT have been examined on a sample of 995 first year students enrolled in different programmes at Universities of Zagreb and Rijeka. Examining the scope and nature of PT provides important information about the efficiency of the educational system, the quality of teaching in schools, the suitability of the system for assessing school achievement, pupil overload, etc. Present research is a part of the international comparative study on the PT in the transitional countries which was financed by Open Society Institute (OSI). By concentrating on the preparatory courses only, present study aims to examine connection between PT in secondary education and its reflections on the access to the tertiary education through students' perspective. Methodology: To reach the proposed objectives of the study, both quantitative and qualitative research methodology, together with desk research, were used. Quantitative research was used in order to gather information about the scope of PT usage in Croatia and helped in portraying the typical PT user whilst providing insights into students' attitudes toward PT. Whereas in Croatia there are six Universities, a decision was made to include only two universities in the sample; University of Zagreb and University of Rijeka. The ratio between them was determined by the total number of students enrolled in these two universities in the year 2003 (around 55 000 students in Zagreb and 12 000 students in Rijeka). The sample included 995 participants, 79.7% from the University of Zagreb and 20.3% from University of Rijeka. Within each University the quota sample of faculties/studies was used. Faculties were divided into high demand (app. 65% of the sample) and low demand programmes (app. 35% of the sample). The number of participants per programme was determined based on the number of students enrolled in 1st undergraduate year in each programme. The used questionnaire was developed by the international group of researchers (authors included) on several occasions during last three years. The questionnaire has proved to have sufficient metric characteristics and has showed reasonable ecological validity. Conclusions: 46.5% of the first year university students in the sample, enrolled on high demand programmes, attended preparatory courses for their university entrance exams in the final year of secondary education. 15.1% of the students enrolled on high demand programmes attended both preparatory courses and private lessons. The high percentage of students attending preparatory courses is a signal of insufficient coherence between secondary and tertiary education, a symptom of incongruence between what has been learned in school and what is required at the entrance exams, which results in unequal opportunities for students coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. Students enrolled in high and low demand programmes significantly differ based on whether they attended preparatory courses. Significantly more of those that later enrolled in high demand programmes (46.5%) attended preparatory courses compared to the students that later enrolled in low demand studies (33.4%). There are three main reasons for attending preparatory courses, regardless on whether students enrol in high or low demand studies - they want to learn better/deeper topics that would be examined, fill a gaps in their knowledge and would like to remember and systematize course topics learnt earlier during schooling years.