Youths’ sporting habits changed tremendously during the last decades causing young people to turn away from classical sport traditions and follow new, trendy forms of sports. This does not mean that traditional, classical forms of sports disappear over time but new forms emerge and get preferred in which the traditional values (personality, community values, social competences besides physical development) of sports are not necessarily valid (Miller et al. 2012; Perényi 2013a). What is more, we have to note that participation in these forms of sports is not equally accessible for all. It is a paradox that healthy lifestyle, sporty, strong and slim body, and health awareness are emphasized by social communication, fashion and education, the number of those who do exercise regularly is decreasing (Földesi Szabó 2009a; Perényi 2013b).

            If we examine sports in higher education, we can perceive a unique phenomenon. Sporting possibilities and infrastructure are ensured locally and are highly dependent on university managements in charge for sport. As for students, the lack of doing sports or physical inactivity is rather an individual decision and possibly it is the most difficult attempt to change such attitudes. This is a huge problem as university students are considered the group with the highest social status and will hopefully exceed their peers both in terms of economic and cultural capital but their health behaviour is not a positive example. On the other hand, it is their last chance to be provided by regular in-class and extracurricular sport possibilities (by universities) before they enter the labour market (Földesi Szabó 2009b; 2010; Nagy 2010). However we should also note that due to the massification of higher education, a number of low social status students enter universities/colleges that had not have opportunities to practice extracurricular sports before. Thus, universities might have a balancing role in this issue. All these individual and social characteristics call for an examination to investigate sports’ role, place, and significance among students to identify factors that determine sporting habits (Kovács 2012). In our paper we attempt to examine the above problems in a Hungarian-Romanian cross-border region, among the students in the Partium higher education institutions. Our aim so to describe students’ sporting habits, to identify the social, community-environmental and institutional factors that influence these. To answer these questions we used a complex theoretical framework, which contains three pillars: Bourdieu’s theory on capitals and habits (Bourdieu 1991, 2008), Hradil’s theory on milieus (Hradil 1995) and Bandura’s social learning theory (Bandura 1989).

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