New Zionist : News and Discussion on the Future of Zionism, Israel, and the Jewish People

Back about thirty years ago Israeli higher education was on the international up and up. Computer science at the Technion, economics at Tel Aviv University, and mathematics at Hebrew U. were all riding the wave of credibility and recognition that any university strives for. These three institutions were the breading ground of much of the development in the subsequent years in technology, business, and academia. They gave Israel a place on the map of intellectual respect, leading Israel and Israeli academics to be an integral part of the globalized scholarly community. Israel was able to ride this wave for a number of years, but recently the pendulum has swung the other way, quickly and decisively.

The internal decay of education in Israel has started to show outward cracks, many cracks in fact. Over the past five years Israeli government has continuously shown its preference for placing education at the bottom of a long list of other priorities. The high ranking and prestige that Israel enjoyed a decade ago have been replaced by ever decreasing government funding, stagnant teacher salaries, and dropping student scores.

A recent article in BusinessWeek cites to some alarming statistics. Back in the late 60’s Israel was highly ranked in the Western World in math and science, and as of 2002 it has dropped to number 33 out of 41, behind countries like Thailand and Romania. Government funding for education has dropped from 9.3% of GDP in 2002 to 8.3% of GDP today. Funding at the university level has dropped 20% in the same period. Class sizes at the at the high school level have swelled to an average of 38 students per class, and according to the OECD Israeli teacher’s salaries are the lowest in the industrialized world. In addition, the most recent OECD Program for Student Assessment shows that Israel is statistically significantly below the OECD average in all three categories of math, reading, and science (and also below the US in all three). All of these issues have been exacerbated by the demographic growth of the country due to birth rates and Aliyah.

What has emerged over the recent years is a quickly deteriorating downward spiral. Less funding means less teachers, less class hours, and lower quality education. Population growth has led to less money per student, less attention per student, and subsequently lower aptitude. This in turn has led to dumbing down, both of the qualifications needed to be a teacher, and the qualifications to be a successful student. The end result of both of these factors is less faculty members, more students, and less competence for both.

This past year has seen the issue of education reach a breaking point. The second semester of the last academic year was endangered by a massive strike of the student union against the threat of increasing university tuitions. The government refused to allocate more funding to the public institutions, and the students refused to bear the financial burden of supporting their own education.

This current academic semester has been plagued by an ongoing teacher’s strike, both at the High School and University levels, with the goal of increasing salaries and improving teaching conditions. The government refused to meet the demands of the high school teachers and eventually forced them to return to work on threat of termination. The University level educators are still continuing their quixotic pursuit of more money. The effect of this semester’s strike is a class action filed against the high school teachers by disgruntled parents, and the lingering threat of the semester’s cancellation at the university level.

Next semester will undoubtedly suffer through another students strike at the Universities due to the fact that the issue of tuition was not solved last time, but rather was just postponed. The result will be three continuous semesters of crippling strikes, threatening to jeopardize an entire academic year. The aftereffects could be calamitous. Lost salaries of those students hoping to graduate and find work, delayed or differed plans for those students looking to progress in life, and the mental/emotional strain of wasting an entire year due to stagnation and inactivity.

All of these signs point to a very bleak academic future in Israel. Those students with skills and funding will opt to study abroad, and those without skills and funding will be forced to remain in a system that does not support them. Those teachers with clout and recognition will opt to teach abroad (specifically at the University level), and those without will remain with low salaries and poor conditions. Universities will have their financial backing from the government trimmed even more, resulting in the elimination of entire departments, specifically those in humanities and arts.

The most disturbing aspect of this entire predicament is that Israel is effectively shooting itself in the foot. As has been pointed out in countless academic articles from numerous academic fields (and as we have written about before), the one factor that consistently has positive effects on the future is education. Education not only creates the tools needed to compete in the global economy, it also boosts GDP growth and lowers the poverty gap, and thousands of other positive spillover effects. This is glaringly true for a country like Israel that has nothing to offer the rest of the world besides brain power and human capital. The academic prowess of the country in the seventies and eighties paved the way for the economic growth and global presence that developed in the nineties and today. The academic decay of the last decade, and most probably of the coming years, will lead to the economic decline and marginalization of the country in the future.

Education is not exactly a public good. It falls in the category of semi-public. According to the academic literature, early education, primary and secondary school, specifically through eighth grade, but ideally through high school, should be treated as a public good. Every single child needs access to the highest quality education the government is willing to provide. A recent Economist survey on education stated simply “More important than either [other factors affecting education], though, are high-quality teachers: a common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates”. Pure and simple, this means more government funding directly targeted at making the teaching profession more attractive to more qualified individuals.

The university level becomes a little more complex, though, and the current thinking is that it needs to be a combination of public and private. At one extreme is the US model of private universities, which can cost nearly $40K a year to attend. At the other extreme is France, which has no tuition fees at all. Both extremes have negative ramifications. On the one hand, the US system creates massive disparity in educational attainment, which feeds in to the poverty gap and earning potential. On the other hand, the French system is notorious for inefficiency, poor quality, and low rankings. The reality is the grey area somewhere in between, like the UC system in California, or schools in Canada.

So what can be done in the case of Israel? For high schools the answer is simple, more funding targeted to the right places, primarily toward hiring excellent staff. For universities, it is a combination of increasing tuition, increasing government funding, and creating a government mandated student loan structure like ones that exist in Europe and in the US (There are no student loans in Israel, even though the government has been toying with the idea of creating such a scheme for years).

Sounds easy enough, right? It would be except for the fact that any spare cash Israel has to throw around has been earmarked for other projects like increased defense spending, subsidizing illegal housing projects in East Jerusalem, and funding more settlements. Again this comes down to a matter of priorities. As much as the government claims that education is a primary concern, a quick budgetary analysis proves otherwise. The real issue with educational decay in Israel is not class size or marginal increases in tuition. The real issue is deciding what is more important for the future of the country as a whole, and pressuring the government to respond. My personal opinion is that maintaining a high quality of human capital is supremely more important in the long run than paying for the construction of 50 out-houses on a hill south of Jenin.

Ultimately, the people who suffer the most from all of these strikes and inefficiencies are the students themselves, the overwhelming bulk who just want to study and finish their degree so they can get a nice job and afford to pay rent. They should be the ones protesting and petitioning to restructure the government’s budgetary expenditure. They are the ones who will carry the next generation, and the country should recognize their pivotal role in shaping the future. Ironically, it is this same bulk the middle that are the least inclined to ruffle feathers, leaving their fate in the hands of the strangers and extremists.