Changes in higher education in Hungary are strongly related to those in the economic and social environment. Since the change of the political system in the late 1980s, Hungarian economic development has been marked by periods of contraction and expansion. Notwithstanding this process, influenced in part by the state's imposition of restrictive policies to control economic growth, the need for higher education has continually grown. The number of tertiary students increased fourfold between 1990 and 2003, and the student-teacher ratio increased from 5.9 to 16.5--more than two and a half times. By 2005 more than 40% of the appropriate age group participated in higher education. In Hungary these processes--such as growing needs and fewer resources--occurred within a decade and simultaneously, while the same processes were consecutive and lasted for a longer time in the West. Since other significant issues of higher educational policy remained unsolved during the alternation of cycles of restrictive and expansive educational policies, the current processes try to deal with the effects of this accelerated restructuring all at once during the "European harmonization." The changes are called "reform" in Hungarian, an expression that has a positive second meaning in the Hungarian historical mind. Through Hungarian journals and interviews with members of the academic world, this paper examines the state of higher education reform in Hungary, particularly the issues and concerns pertaining to its implementation of the Bologna process. (Contains 1 note.)