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Trajtenberg: “It is Impossible to Ignore the Fact that the System of Higher Education in Israel is in Decline”
by Meirav Arlosoroff Published in “The Marker,” the business magazine of Ha’aretz May 11, 2010
In contrast, the average age of the faculty in seven research-oriented universities in Israel is 55, an age when almost no big discoveries are made. The meaning of this is that the big successes of Israeli academia are in the past. With the current faculty’s age distribution, the chances of receiving new Nobel prizes are slim; research-based academia in Israel is on the decline. Trajtenberg, an economics Professor at Tel Aviv University and, until recently, Chair of the National Council on Economics at the Prime Minister’s Office, is 60. According to the rule, his grand academic peak is already behind him. So, armed with the enthusiastic support of the young Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar, he now deals less with discoveries and more with saving the system of higher education in Israel.
“The system of higher education in Israel was one of the best in the world”, says Trajtenberg. “The number of research publications per person – even when they are weighted by such quality measurers as the number of Nobel prizes – is one of the highest in the world. In certain fields, like chemistry, economics and game theory, we used to be a real world empire. The aspect of the rate of the highly educated within the general population indicates that our situation is excellent. But we cannot ignore the fact that over the last decade the system has been in decline.”
The decline is reflected in an enormous brain drain – today, 25% of Israeli researchers work abroad, including in the best universities in the world – in the decline in the number of senior faculty, and in the sharp rise in their age, as well as in the deterioration of the ratio between the number of students and the number of faculty.
Trajtenberg emphasizes the last two parameters: the average age of the faculty in Israel is 55 (compared to 43 in Britain), and the ratio of faculty to students is 1:24. During the peak of their glory days, the ratio in Israeli universities was 1:17. For comparison’s sake, the faculty-student ratio at the top ten universities in the world is less than 1:10. A ratio of 1:20 characterizes those universities rated 50 and lower in the world. That is a rating that Israel really does not want to reach.
Accessibility comes at the expense of quality
“In the previous decade, Israel was focused on increasing accessibility to higher education. In the era before the colleges, universities were very elitist, and only 25% of the population got to walk through their gates”, says Trajtenberg.
“The state, rightly, thought that higher education should be accessible to all, and so we focused on developing colleges. More than 30 colleges opened, the number of students in higher education institutions tripled, the number of those with higher education rose from 25% in every age group to 47%, and the road to social and economic leadership was paved for entire swaths of the population. However, the focus on accessibility came at the expense of quality. Those same higher education budgets were spread over many more institutions and students, and hurt the budgets of research universities. Now is the time to go back and put the emphasis on the quality of higher education in Israel, and the quality must be reached by increasing the number of academic faculty, that is, lowering the ratio between the faculty and the students, while also lowering the faculty’s age.”
The five-year plan for the system of higher education in Israel is centered on a massive absorption of new and young academic faculty, which will inject new blood into the research labs and the lecture halls. The plan, formulated by CHE and supported by the Minister of Education, tries to use the tough chronological problem of the research universities in Israel in its favor: no fewer than 820 faculty are about to retire in the next five years. This is bad news for the universities, but a rare opportunity for them to revolutionize the workforce: instead of the old retiring faculty, the university will absorb no fewer than 1,660 new faculty – a net growth of 840 faculty. In relation to the existing number of faculty, 4,600, this is a mini-revolution with a growth rate of almost 20% in the number of faculty.
This mini-revolution will be further enhanced by those who will be nominated to be absorbed as new faculty: tens of thousands of researchers who had moved abroad due to a lack of research grants in Israel, and tens of thousands of young academics who have not found their place in academia. These are the best of the young people, and, in the case of Israel - the inventory it can choose from, here and abroad, is a big and great.
Yet, this is only a mini-revolution. The reason: a 20% growth in the number of faculty will lower the average age and inject new blood, but will lower the ratio between students and faculty in Israeli academia only to 1:20 – a ratio worse than 1:17, which characterized Israeli academia during its peak.
Why is the CHE satisfied with only a 20% growth, when the global statistics allegedly testify that the need is much greater? The reason is, of course, budget limitations. Even as is, the five-year plan presented by the CHE will be very expensive.
The reason for this is that the absorption of a new faculty member does not happen in a vacuum. Every faculty member of this kind requires a support system of laboratory workers, technicians, junior faculty and administrative help. In addition, every such faculty member requires a research absorption package. “The budgetary distress in the last decade”, says Trajtenberg, “has brought about a sharp erosion in research and teaching infrastructure. When there is no money, it is easiest to stop building new labs and stop equipping the existing ones”.
An upgrade of infrastructure in Israeli universities is necessary in the areas of research and its budget. “The size of the grant given by the Israel Science Foundation is 160,000 NIS per year. That is laughable. This amount is not even worth the paperwork one must fill out in order to receive it. We decided, as a preliminary step, to enlarge the yearly grant to 380,000 NIS, which will draw quality research proposals to the Foundation”, says Trajtenberg. This means doubling the Foundation’s budget from 270 to 500 million NIS per year.
The treasury will have to pay
But that’s not all. In addition, the CHE also decided to broaden the access of the weaker populations in Israel—Haredi and minorities—to higher education; something that requires a specific allocation to colleges on the periphery, as well as particular support for universities so that they are able to absorb Haredi students.
On top of all this we should also add the pension crisis looming over the system of higher education in Israel. The university pension deficits (actuarial), due to the pension budgets they agreed to pay their academic faculty, amount to over 16 billion NIS. The Hebrew University already spends more than a quarter of its current expenses on pension payments. Undoubtedly, any change to the system of higher education in Israel will have to include a solution to the pension problem, mostly likely to take shape as an agreement between the CHE, the universities, the lecturers, and the treasury regarding the worsening of the pension terms, alongside agreements on administrative flexibility by the lecturers; on the other hand, the treasury will have to agree to fund the pension deficits out of the state’s budget.
This, of course, is the weak point in CHE’s five-year plan. In order for the five-year plan to be able to develop, it requires a complex agreement between the treasury, the lecturers, the universities and the students. The students will have to agree to a rise in tuition fees; the lecturers will have to agree to a worsening of the pension terms and the flexibility of their employment contracts; university management will have to agree to stricter transparency and responsible governance; and the treasury will have to agree to pay, a lot.
How much is a lot? Trajtenberg refuses to elaborate as the amounts in question are still under negotiation. Still, it is estimated that there are 2-3 billion NIS in question, which account for a 40% rise in the higher education budget in Israel. These amounts are so large that Trajtenberg – who until recently worked directly with the treasury as part of his position as chief of the National Economic Council – knows in advance that he will not be able to get them all. Although the treasury supports the five-year plan and seems prepared to allocate large budgets for it, they may not be sufficient. So, he compromised in advance, to a growth of only 20% in academic faculty, in the name of the system of higher education in Israel.
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