The question whether women could study at universities became the centre of attention in the second half of the 19th century. Women could matriculate and graduate at Hungarian universities from the second semester of the 1895/96 academic year, but they could only attend the faculties of art and medicine, and pharmaceutical courses. The contemporary discourse on the higher education of women leads the scholar to believe that women attending universities at the time came primarily from the middle classes. This assumption is further supported by statistical data. The majority of female students at the Budapest University of Sciences came from families of civil servants and intellectuals, while the daughters of tradesmen and even more merchants were also represented in greater numbers at the university. The group of female students was relatively homogenic, the overwhelming majority representing the middle classes, and especially its more wealthy and educated, but not affluent segment. The medical faculty could be considered the most open of the above-mentioned options: it was attended by female students coming from the lower-income families, and this was also the faculty where the civil servant/intellectual segment was the least represented. The group of male students was more heterogenic than the female group. The civil servant/intellectual segment was less represented among them, with the exception of the legal faculty, which could be considered a case on its own. The rate of male students coming from lower-income families was also considerably higher than that of female students. This is not surprising, considering that those layers of society who could rarely afford to send their children to universities opted for spending their limited financial means on educating their sons, the men being the breadwinners of the family, and also whose position in society determined the social status of the family. Belonging to the wealthy and educated middle classes was far more obvious in case of female students than in case of their male colleagues.