More focus on society, less on student development – mission-change of Hungarian higher education institutions between 2017 and 2023

Abstract In a constantly changing world, universities have to make considerable efforts to legitimise themselves both as higher education institutions (HEIs) and as important and future-oriented institutions that serve society. These legitimacy claims can be detected in mission statements, which are commonly used communication tools to reach stakeholders. Accordingly, this research aims to investigate the change in mission of Hungarian HEIs between 2017 and 2023. We analysed 35 Hungarian HEIs’ publicly available mission texts from their official websites and distinguished 38 mentioned social roles and responsibilities. The longitudinal approach made it possible to identify the unchanging social roles and, at the same time, to identify the emerging and disappearing roles and stakeholders. The results show that the ‘Education’, ‘Science, research’, ‘External relations’, ‘High quality’, and ‘Traditions, values’ role groups are stable throughout the years. We perceive them as legitimating role groups in that their mention seems to be continuously present. There is only one role group, which showed an increasing tendency: the roles indicating services to and well-being of society. However, this heightened focus on society’s demands seems to be reached at the expense of student-centredness because the frequency of mentioned roles and responsibilities concerning the students significantly decreased. The question arose whether these changes can be connected to the transformation in higher education governance and the spreading of new managerialism, or rather mirror the HEIs’ attempts to react to the challenges and changes in the international and national environment and address the difficulties of mission overload.