42 billion Ft to fund foreign students at Hungarian universities — while Hungarian parents pay for their own children's education from after-tax wages.

Indoklás

This is the chapter's third-largest line and the budgetary base of the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship system — state-funded places at Hungarian universities for foreign students, administered through the foreign-affairs portfolio as an instrument of diplomatic and economic outreach. The case for tax-financing it is weak on the framework's terms. The benefit is concentrated: it accrues to a defined population of foreign scholarship recipients and to the universities that receive the per-place funding. The cost is dispersed across Hungarian taxpayers, including the working family whose own children study at the same universities without a comparable subsidy. Consider the arithmetic at family scale. The line is 41,970.0 millió Ft. For a worker at a 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage,[^4] the chapter's claim on the general tax pool that funds programmes like this is real money — a recurring transfer to a scholarship system whose recipients are, by design, not the taxpayer's own household. A Hungarian parent paying SZJA and the social contribution tax to fund foreign-student places, while financing their own child's education from after-tax income, is the seen-and-unseen mismatch in domestic form. The diplomatic-outreach rationale is genuine but it is a preference, not a rights-protection function: it belongs to the discretionary category. A four-year phase-out protects students mid-degree — a student who enrolled in reliance on a funded multi-year place must be able to complete it — while ending new intakes. The horizon matches a standard degree cycle.