The annually organized Campus Festival in Debrecen is one of the musical summer festivals in Hungary, which attract masses of people and consider higher education students as their primary target community. Besides musical events, organizers of the Campus Festival put a special emphasis on the promotion of the sports life of the visiting audience. The Campus Sports Festival is organized every year; it aims to popularize sports and sporting activities and to create a social event where students, fans and athletes of Hungarian and foreign (Romanian, Slovakian and Ukrainian) higher education institutions are able to establish relationships with each other. The aim of a questionnaire survey prepared in 2017 was to carry out an assessment of needs, in the scope of which the opinion and demand of higher education students related to sports festivals and leisure sports is surveyed. Present study introduces the sporting habits of higher education students and their motivations related to sports and the sports festival. The analysis was carried out by means of the SPSS software package, while the differences among the countries were studied using Pearson's Chi-square test and the Mann-Whitney test and Categorical Principal Component Analysis. It was established that higher education students belonging to the sample prefer active entertainment and one of their favourite leisure activities is doing sports and that the scale of values of the surveyed higher education students is mostly influenced by fellow students and friends. It was also found that for higher education students, health is a more important motivational factor -- in relation with sports -- than physical appearance.