Analysis: Higher Education: Still broken, despite the fix

"The writing has been on the wall for 35 years, and it's really a question of national priorities," says Tel Aviv University economics professor Dan Ben-David.

By ABE SELIG
While the last-minute averting of a university strike will allow for studies to begin on schedule Sunday morning, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's intervention and the subsequent Finance Ministry approval of funding for the academic year, according to both American and Israeli professors, is merely a temporary remedy for a system long in need of an overhaul. "This isn't something that just started happening in the last few years," said Tel Aviv University economics professor Dan Ben-David. "The writing has been on the wall for 35 years, when we began to see a decline after the Yom Kippur War, and it's really a question of national priorities. We have the funding, we have the resources, the question is if higher education is a high enough priority to allocate them there." Ben-David added that the problems facing the country's universities were not limited to economic woes, but included a lack of new positions, salary gaps between Israeli universities and foreign ones and a micromanagement system that allocated money while dictating how it should be spent - all leading to the often-mourned "brain drain" afflicting Israeli universities in recent years. "It's a crazy situation," Ben-David said. "You have department heads who are accountable for the success of their departments and can't do much about it, because the Finance Ministry gets in your insides and tries to tell you how to spend all the money it just approved for your department." "We're a country that prides itself on thinking outside the box, and this really isn't so difficult. It doesn't have to be complicated," he said. Ben-David suggested a three-tier system that could be applied to universities to free-up funding, address tuition issues, and turn around the current trend that sees some of the best academics leave for Europe and America - hopefully even bringing them back here. "We could copy from the American GI Bill," Ben-David explained. "There's no reason that someone who doesn't serve their country should have subsidized education. So if you serve in the army, or even if you do national service, that puts you in the top tier, with full, subsidized education. If my kid serves the country for three years, the country should pay him back. "After that, the second tier could include those who choose not to serve in the army or in national service. They pay a higher tuition, similar to an in-state tuition in the America. They should still be able to study, just without government assistance." And finally," Ben-David continued, "The third tier would include foreign students. We still have some of the best universities in the world, and these students would pay a sort of out-of-state tuition - we would effectively open up our universities to the world, and a side benefit of that would be that people would get to see an Israel that they don't see on CNN." Still, Ben-David explained, issues relating to universities' senior faculty - half of whom are over the age of 55 and will retire in the next 10 years - were enormous, and would require additional steps to overcome. "Who's going to replace these people?" Ben-David asked. "Who's even thinking about these issues?" Harold Kaufman, a professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn, offered similar insights. "It seems to me that there are so many political forces at play in Israeli universities, more so than we have in the US," Kaufman said. "And while each constituency is fighting for what it wants, in the end, the entire system becomes very dysfunctional. It boils down to resources and how you allocate them. How important is higher education to the government?" Kaufman added that there appeared to be an attitude of entitlement that had permeated the higher education system, in which students feel that the state owes them something. "And I don't think that's a bad point," Kaufman said. "Here you have young people who are serving three years in the army, and when they get out, they feel that, 'Hey, I gave my time and my body to the state, now the state needs to take care of me.'" Kaufman's ideas for change echoed Ben-David's as far as bringing in new models, even with aspects of privatization. "I think there needs to be a nuanced privatization here," Kaufman said. "I think something like the GI Bill could work very well, depending of course on how many years of service an individual gave, or what kind of service it was. "But I think there are other initiatives that could be put into use as well, mainly using industry and non-profit organizations in the private sector, to invest in students with scholarships, internships, co-op programs and work-study programs, where these businesses are investing in young minds and seeing a return on their investment when the students come into the work force." Both professors agreed that changes needed to made; how they come about and who will make them, however, remains to be seen. "Years ago there was the Katchalski Report that dealt with how Israel should address its science and hi-tech sectors," Kaufman said. "That report set the foundation for Israel to become one of the hi-tech centers of the world. I think there needs to be another report, maybe one with more radical ideas, and hopefully, in a new government, there might even be the power to implement it."