Societies in the CEE counties are still struggling with the challenges of the social-economic transformation even two decades after the political changes. In some peripheral areas the employment opportunities are limited, the infrastructure is less developed and the rate of the graduated population is lower (Kozma 1998). Although we can find higher educational centres with long tradition here, the number of young people from lower status families is relatively more in the school system and recently in higher education as well. The quick expansion of the secondary education of the 90s was followed by the first wave of the expansion of the tertial education almost immediately. Young people got to the tertiary education from families where the parents had not had any experience on the higher levels of the educational system (Pusztai-Szabó 2008). This is why a significant part of the students have difficulties to combat the problems of entering and being able to stay in the tertiary education (Reay et al. 2009). In the university centres of the peripheral areas the success of the tertiary educational institutes is considered not only by the effective learning of the higher status students but by the fact that they are able to support the entrance, the integration and the success of the lower status students as well (Pusztai 2010). An equitable HE system ensures that the access, participation and outcomes are not determined by social factors, but should be the result of the students’ ability and study effort (Koucky et al 2010). Our research during the last decade showed that the university centres in  the crossborder areas must face particularly big challenge in this respect. In these crossborder areas there are more students who need bigger institutional help because of their disadvantaged situation, their national-cultural identity, their earlier school career and their home. On the basis of the theory on the benefits of the effect of social capital to school career (Coleman 1988) and our earlier research experience (Pusztai 2008, Pusztai et al 2010) we suppose that the available forms of the relational resources in educational institutions can compensate the reproductive mechanisms in school career.  We conceptualized the expanded faculty role model and the closer professional and personal contacts as the appearance of the informal institutional social capital, and the participation in the student gift attendance programs as the indicator of the formal institutional social capital (Fónai, 2009, Fónai et al. 2010). The effect of the gift attendance program is based mainly on formal relations and institutional intervention, so it gives possibility to compare the two support methods having different goals and tools. We examined how the informal and formal mate capital affects to the effectiveness of students and to the further steps to higher educational levels. In our lecture we will try to find the answer to the question of how the formal and informal compensational mechanisms can promote the higher education career of the disadvantaged students.

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