Enhancing Access to Higher Education for Negev Bedouin

On June 10th, Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) approved a four year, NIS 20 Million pilot to enhance access to higher education for the Negev Bedouin community. The goal of the pilot is to develop a “holistic solution to the range of barriers” faced by Negev Bedouin “to entering Israeli academia and acquiring a quality academic degree in fields with a labor market horizon.”

The pilot is an extension of the multi-year plan launched in full by the CHE in 2012. Three years into the program, the CHE recognized that Negev Bedouin “need a special program that goes above and beyond the projects currently being implemented for the entire Arab population, due to its significant distance from the higher education system and the difficulties it faces in being accepted and studying in Israeli academic institutions.”

Sapir College in the northwestern Negev will implement the program, while funding is provided mostly by the CHE, as well as by the Ministry of Agriculture (which houses the Headquarters for Bedouin society), the Authority for Economic Development of the Arab Sector, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of the Negev and Galilee, and Sapir itself.

In this first phase of the program, 130 Bedouin students that pass a selection process will be invited to participate. Selected students will join a special summer program to strengthen basic academic skills, develop soft skills, and get exposure to in-demand fields (e.g. computers, accounting, social work, economics). After the summer, students will attend a special preparatory year before enrolling as first-years in the regular academic program at Sapir College.

The program comes with NIS 30,000 in financial assistance for tuition and living expenses per student per year–as well as additional scholarships for excelling students.  Students will also be accompanied, assisted and mentored throughout their studies and graduates will receive assistance from the Riyan Employment Centers to enter the job market.

Pilot program layout  (click to enlarge)

Over the past two years, a CHE team headed by Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg and Merav Shaviv conducted a thorough assessment of all programs (public and private) currently available to the Bedouin community, and the existing barriers, statistics and progress within Bedouin society on this issue. Their findings revealed:

• Very low matriculation exams (bagruyot) results – moreover, matriculation results often do not provide  an accurate representation of knowledge and personal capacities;
• Low Psychometric exam (‘Israeli SAT’) results – An average of 200 points lower, out of a total of 800, than the Israeli average score;
• Language gaps – most Bedouins speak a colloquial dialect, making Arabic their second language, Hebrew their third, and English their fourth;
• Lack of education and career guidance – few role models and little familiarity with academic options, labor market relevance, pre-academic assistance options, etc.;
• Culture gap – Bedouin struggle with the transition to university life since most come from relatively traditional and rural communities and arrive at the university of college at an early age, often leaving their village and family and experiencing a modern institution for the first time;
• Economic strain –  Bedouin students come from the poorest population group in Israel and have less ability to sustain studies over a span of years, resulting in a desire to see quick results and access to employment;
• Lack of adequate public transportation – getting to class is challenging due to inadequate public transportation throughout the Negev and especially to and from Bedouin localities. This poses a particular challenge for Bedouin women, many of whom need to return home after school every day;
• Unstable course of study – Bedouin have high dropout rates; change their majors more than the average; take four or five years to graduate (instead of the usual three); and many do not find work upon graduation.

All these factors have lead to general feelings of frustration, low motivation and significant number of youngsters going to study in the West Bank and Jordan, as well as Eastern Europe, instead of trying to succeed within the Israeli higher education system. The CHE estimates that in 2014, around 1600 Israeli Bedouin students were enrolled at Hebron University, where basic skills needed to integrate into the Israeli job market–such as Hebrew language–are not strengthened.

Bedouin society (see Task Force Fact Sheet) is poorest among Israeli poopulations. Enhancing access to higher education within Israel and providing support to translate education to employment would improve Bedouin communities, strengthen Jewish-Arab relations, reduce national costs associated with poverty, and strengthen the economy as a whole.