Can the admission system have an influence on university selection?

In our paper, we would like to compare the higher education admission systems of two neighboring Central European countries, those of Hungary and Slovakia. We found this comparison particularly interesting because, in Slovakia, most universities admit applicants without an entrance exam, based on their grades from high school (sometimes even without taking into account school leaving exam results). Universities define their admission re-quirements themselves and make decisions on which of the applicants they wish to give an opportunity to locally. There are no central quotas defined. A given student who applies to 3 universities might get 3 different results in the respective application processes and theoret-ically can parallelly get accepted by several institutions. In such a case, in Slovakia, the stu-dent concerned must make the decision where to study in the possession of the exact infor-mation about his choices.In contrast, Hungary has a centralized admission system under which high school students are admitted to the higher education system via a transparent points system. The number of points is calculated based on study points (a maximum of 200 points), school leaving exam points (a maximum of 200 points) and additional points (a maximum of 100 points). Under this system, students must define which institution they would prefer as early as the time of application; if they are accepted, they cannot change the priorities afterwards.We were seeking to find out what differences arise in the number of students accepted into a university as a result of the application of these two systems. To find out, we have assessed data from the given academic years about the number of students who finished high school and the number of those who were accepted into one of the higher education institutions. We used data from the Central Statistical Office (Hungary), the Ministry of Education (Slo-vakia) and Eurostat.