As a result of the new borders in Central Europe set by the post-World War I peace treaties large Hungarian communities were left under the control of countries they had no connection with in terms of linguistic, cultural, or national identity. The cultural environments in their new countries (today’s Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine,Romania,Serbia,Croatia,and Slovenia) were entirely different from one another.In some of those countries, they still live in a nearly homogeneous bloc, while in others they live in diaspora. Their access to education in their mother tongue also differs. All in all, calculation of assimilation based on census and population movement statistics showed that assimilation among Hungarians living in Slovakia and Serbia is high, while in Romania and Ukraine it is extremely low (Hablicsek at al. 2004).
During the communist era, there were political obstacles to mother tongue education. Therefore, minority schools are a means of protecting a minority and maintaining their identity; on the other hand, access to mother tongue teaching is crucial not only for a successful school career, by this for social mobility. In our research, we examined the social composition, position, and perceptions of minority students in the four different countries with the largest Hungarian communities (Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia) among the first researchers. Our study uses previous research statistical data to learn how the social status of minority students affects their perception of their life prospects. We raised three research questions: What is the social background of students in minority Hungarian higher education institutions? What factors influence their higher education choices as well as their visions of their future work? Finally, what factors influence their life plans? In other words, we mapped their religiosity and their views on the meaning of life and on generated trust because students’ ideas of their goals in life and world views are indicative of the minorities’ perceptions toward life prospects (at a time when their populations are gradually decreasing). Students’ views on the meaning of life were surveyed with the 10 items of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ-H) adapted to Hungarian conditions (Martos & Konkolly Thege, 2012; Steger, Frazier, Oishi, & Kaler, 2006). According to this approach our hypotheses on the basis of the statistical features of the communities and the findings of our own research, which goes back over a decade (Pusztai, 2015) was, that the proportion of students whose parents had a low level of education would be higher in minority institutions than that of majority Hungarians at home because of the expansion of minority education and the academic and residential mobility of the high status population. We also assumed that in countries where minority Hungarians assimilated more, parents of students were of higher status. We presupposed that owing to the disadvantages of minority existence that manifested themselves in mother tongue education, office procedures, and employment, ethnic Hungarian students would express a more negative attitude toward the meaning of life and generated trust than their majority peers in Hungary. We hypothesized that in countries where minority Hungarians assimilated more, they had a more positive attitude toward the meaning of life and generated trust. We hypothesized that the minority communities would share a strong religious identity and that their religious practice would be more intense, since religiosity may support national identity in a multicultural and multiethnic environment (Doktór, 2007; Pusztai & Fényes, 2012). We hypothesized that in countries where minority Hungarians assimilated more and discarded their ancestral cultures, their religious practice was less intense.
