Although efforts were made to establish several higher education institutes in the Medieval era, Hungarian higher education began in 1635 when the first university, which is still in operation today, was founded. For the first one hundred and fifty years the university was under the influence of the church, then under Absolutism, it came under the rule of the Crown. The period between the last decades of the 19th century and World War I is considered the golden era of autonomy in Hungarian higher education, although the influence of the government was significant. After World War I the universities' autonomy decreased, and by the end of World War II, it had completely disappeared. The change came just before 1990 when the collapse of Soviet rule led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the early 1990s, the first independent and general Higher Education Act established the 'Humboldt model' in Hungary. However, this was only in place for three years. Over the past twenty years, we have seen the autonomy of Hungarian higher education and its institutions slowly decrease. This study discusses the past thirty years and aims to understand the reasons for the failure of the autonomy experiment. [For the complete Volume 17 proceedings, see ED596826.]