The research focuses on active personal and community citizenship, political participation, self-organisation by generations and patterns of public and community activity in the interpretive communities of higher education, as well as on new forms of public activity and the development of student organisations in the new millennium. The empirical source of this article is the database resulting from the study “Active Youth in Hungary” (Aktív fiatalok Magyarországon) (2013, N=1300). This article presents the characteristics of the different phases in the life-cycle of higher education students’ unions as organisations (in terms of performance, creativity, risk-taking, administration and integration). The author analyses the institution system of students’ unions, and the underlying causes of shifts in functions and values and their consequences by using a sociology-of-youth approach to higher educations’ historical milestones between 2000 and 2013. The reforms introduced in Hungarian higher education in the new millennium, in particular the introduction of the credit system, led to the transformation of the students’ collective interests which caused a shift in values, a decline of advocating function and the loss of the mass base in the students’ union movement.