Compared to previous decades, young people who want to learn are in an incomparably better situation - said Péter Magyar, head of the Student Loan Center, who spoke to Mandiner about the unique lending model. We extracted some details from the interview.

Student loans were launched by the first Orbán government with the aim of ensuring that there are no young Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin who cannot participate in higher education for financial reasons. In the past twenty years, we have helped approximately five hundred thousand students, disbursing them loans with favorable terms worth nearly HUF 500 billion. Half of the applying students stated that they would not have been able to complete or even begin their studies without the student loan, i.e. the Student Loan Center helped nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians to obtain their diploma.

At the beginning of the 2000s, the proportion of graduates among young people was below 30 percent, today it is 37 percent, which was also contributed to by student loan schemes.(...)

As in many areas of the Hungarian economy, after 2010 the market and the borrowers were able to breathe, and since then interest rates have been continuously decreasing. At the moment, we offer the free-to-use Student Loan 1 at a historically low interest rate of 1.99 percent, without a credit check or collateral. There is no personal loan on the market that can be applied for on similarly favorable terms. The maximum monthly allowance has recently increased from 75,000 to 150,000 forints, so in one semester a student can get access to 750,000 forints at extremely low interest rates.

The correctness of the decision is shown by the fact that more than eighty percent of the requests already arrive for the highest amount.
The Student Loan2 introduced by the second Orbán government, which can only be used for reimbursement of higher education costs, is completely interest-free; and the free-to-use Student Loan Plusz introduced due to the coronavirus epidemic is also interest-free. From 2018, family discounts were also introduced . Training loan schemes that can be used in vocational training and adult training have recently appeared. The goal is the same as twenty years ago, but the conditions are exponentially better today.(…)

The Student Loan Center operates entirely on a market basis, we raise our funds from the market, which is guaranteed by the state. We take out loans from the Hungarian Development Bank and commercial banks, and the European Investment Bank also makes a significant contribution to our budget; thus, the Student Loan Center bears the expenses of the public finances to a small extent.

Only the interest subsidies for Student Loans 2, Student Loans Plus and training loans introduced on May 31, as well as family discounts, come from state sources. It is important to note that the free Student Loan1 can be used not only by young Hungarians within Hungary, but also at any university in the European Economic Area, and it is also available to Hungarian citizens abroad. Every year, more than a hundred requests are received from, for example, Cluj-Napoca and Marosvásárhely.

the article in its entirety here.