The Hungarian Institute for Higher Educational Research is the successor of
the Hungarian Institute for Educational Research, founded in 1981, and which has been operating since January 2004 under the new name, in a new
registered site, and with an organizational structure that is slightly different
from the previous one.The Institute is an interdisciplinary research centre for social science, dealing with mainly sociological, economic and statistical tools in studies to reveal the social problems of education on international, national, regional and local levels.

The Institute is a subsidiary of the Ministry of Education, but much of its reasearch funding is obtained from national and international scientific project sources.
The Institute deals with research, training, and provides professional and scientific consultation, as well as having a role in tasks in connection with scientific project management..
It studies the operation of the institutional system of education, particularly in the aspect of its transition, and the effects of the changes in the economy and the labour market on the participants in the educational system. It makes analyses of the effect of social and educational processes, and regional variations in those processes, on young people.
Besides research activities, the Institute, which is involved in the system of scientific retraining, organises retraining courses, national professional meetings and conferences.

The leading researchers of the Institute teach in several Hungarian tertiary institutes, as well as lecturing in quite a few PhD training institutes.
The publishing house of the Institute, the Educatio Kiadó, makes the results of the researches of the Institute public since 1992, in a periodical called Educatio , in a serial of books Társadalom és Oktatás (Society and Education), and in a serial of bulletin Kutatás közben (Research papers).
The Institute has a professional educational sociology and educational policy library of more than twenty thousand books, which is in direct contact and co-operation with similar international professional libraries.