Abstract
One of the five primary objectives of the European Union within the framework of Europe 2020 is to increase the proportion of the tertiary educated population. The research task titled “The motivation of the student in the 21st century” is intended to address the factors that have both an impact on the decision of students to pursue higher studies and affect the choice of a specific field of study and a preferred form of study. The stimulus to the exploration was sparked by the mentioned EU initiative, interesting statistical data, the growing number of students studying in the external form compared to the daily option, and an increase of students from abroad. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the causes of these trends. Motivation of students is not researched in a systematic way in Slovakia, even though it is an important factor in a student’s decisionmaking process to study. Information was obtained by a questionnaire distributed to 105 students, evaluated using SPSS software and application of descriptive statistics.