Social Impact Shines in Higher Education

Israel’s young adults are currently tasked with pursuing their dreams while simultaneously dealing with the ramifications of war and contributing to our resilience. Mission impossible?

Some 335,000 students among them returned to campus this month as the country’s new higher education academic year began. The past year’s events have influenced many aspects of the academic experience, including their choices of study.

Data from the country’s institutions of higher education indicate that this year more students have embarked on degrees in psychology, social work, physiotherapy and occupational therapy (reflecting what I wrote in early October about the dramatic increase in mental health and physical disability cases). Enrollment is also up in the fields of nursing and education.

Clearly, thousands of Israel’s students are already making life choices that will positively affect our society in the near future. If anything, war has fueled this proud tradition of ours.

Apropos war: Hezbollah aerial attacks have posed significant challenges especially to those institutions of higher learning located from Haifa northward. This geographical fact also carries social impact significance. For instance: students enrolled at shuttered colleges close to the northern border, which ordinarily cater especially to periphery communities, are now scattered among campuses throughout the country.

Numerically, at least, the situation also has particular significance for Israel’s minority communities. More than 50% of the University of Haifa’s 18,000 students and 30% of the nearby Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s 15,000 students are members of these communities.

While the challenges are obvious, this period also bears good tidings. My memory stretches back far enough to recall last year’s dark forecasts that the war would cause Israel’s Arab students to search for alternatives to our institutions of higher education. Reality proved otherwise: in the last academic year their enrollment actually increased, by an average of 4.2% (including a 5.1% rise among doctorate students).

Besides demonstrating the continuing upward trend of minority empowerment, the figures also show progress in gender equality. According to numbers for the last academic year (which are expected to continue this year as well), women account for 59% of all bachelor degree students; 65% of those studying for a master’s degrees; and 54% of doctorate students.

Not only does Israel top the OECD average for women in higher education, it does so by 10% in the overall number of higher education students. Quite an accomplishment, especially during wartime.

These positive social impact trends make it all the more difficult to stomach the current academic boycott against us. In this context, the Association of University Heads in Israel has documented more than 300 cases of boycotts by counterparts in Europe, the United States and Canada.

Their loss. The Weizmann Institute of Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion – all three government-subsidized, public research universities – consistently appear among the top 100 universities globally in prestigious rankings.

The overt and more evasive covert boycotts are of course totally unacceptable. Having said that, for Israel’s academic world this is also a time of opportunity.

There is no place better to witness this than Sapir College, in Sderot. The 6,000-student public-funded institution, particularly well-known for film studies (a hobby of mine), plays a vital role in Israel’s southern region and serves as a national model of resilience.

Not a given: located barely two miles from the Gaza Strip, 47 of its own community members were murdered by Hamas in last year’s invasion. Undaunted, Sapir fought its way back to full activity after a prolonged period as a closed military area following the attack. With the new academic year in full swing, the school is robustly advancing its educational mission while also addressing the community’s lingering mental health issues.

Inspiring.

This blog post would not be complete without mention of the dilemma faced by students also serving in reserve duty. During the past academic year, about 70,000 of them (20% of all students) were called up. Tens of thousands remain mobilized, missing their studies while defending the country.

Luckily, today they can avail themselves of benefits decided upon by Israel’s government-funded Council for Higher Education, the Defense Ministry and institutions of higher education. Hopefully the measures, which range from academic to cost issues, will help alleviate the students’ plight (44% of those polled by the National Union of Israeli Students said they failed to complete their academic requirements last year, mainly due to army service and/or loss of employment).

Israel’s geo-strategic circumstances will always require its education and defense spheres to exist side-by-side in a strange harmony. Despite this challenge, our students will continue to strengthen both our institutions of higher education and the resilience of society at large.