OECD report: Israel among the first places in the world acquiring academic degrees

About 26% of undergraduate students study computer science, including mathematics and statistics and engineering. This is the fourth year in a row that engineering studies are the most coveted study program in Israel. More than 38,000 students, which is 18.2% of the 208,461 undergraduate students, study engineering. This is according to the report of the Council for Higher Education ahead of the start of the academic year this coming Sunday.
The report shows that engineering studies continue to overtake the social sciences, which for years have been considered the largest field of study in Israel. The report also shows that there is a 40% increase in the number of undergraduate students in high-tech fields. According to the forecast, the increase will be about 80% in the school year starting next week. The strengthening of high-tech professions is also reflected in a more than double increase in the number of students studying mathematics, statistics and computer science in the last decade - 20,062 students in 1959 compared to 9,122 students in 2009/10. In the past year, the number of students in this field has increased by 1,760.
The incoming school year is marked by a return to on-campus learning in the Corona routine combined with hybrid learning, having already begun during the second semester of the school year following the administration of the first two doses of vaccine against Corona. Until then, higher education institutions and students were required to switch to an online learning format.
After the stability that has characterized the higher education system over the past decade, in recent years there has been an increase in the number of general students, which reached its peak in 1959. The council's data show that 350,000 students are expected to study in 59 higher education institutions. Of 4% compared with the 2007/08 school year. There has also been an impressive increase in the number of graduate students - 5,665. The number of postgraduate students also increased by 211.
In the previous school year, there was a jump in the total number of students by almost 24,000 compared to the previous year. The report shows that there is a significant increase in the number of students in high-tech fields, including women studying these subjects.
Women make up about 60% of all students in academia. In a multi-year perspective, this is a significant increase in the participation rate of women in all degrees - 58% in the first degree, 64% in the second degree and 53% in the third degree. In the years 2009-2010, the number of female undergraduate students in computer science, including mathematics and statistics, increased 2.6 times from 2,622 in 2009 to 6,784 in 2007. In engineering studies, the proportion of women increased by about 40% from 8,581 female students in 2009/10 to 12,008 female students last year.
There was also a significant increase of about 72% in the data of undergraduate students studying in the auxiliary fields of medicine, from 8,185 in 2009/10 to 14,106 in 1997/98. This increase was mainly due to the increase in students studying nursing - from about 3,000 to 7,330 in the same period. The number of students in the first year of medical studies at the four faculties of medicine at the universities was only 530 in 2009/10, this year 830 students will start the program.
There has also been an increase in the number of students choosing to study law, after a decline in the last decade.
A significant jump was recorded in the number of students starting with a bachelor's degree and coming from localities located in low socio-economic clusters (clusters 4-1). In 2001/04, almost 58,000 students, who constitute about 30% of undergraduate students, came from these localities. Most of them, about 38% study in public academic colleges.
58,000 students from Arab society also study in academia and they constitute 17% of all students - still a lower proportion than their volume in the general population.
In the last six years, there has been a 45% increase in the number of Ethiopian undergraduate students - from 2,608 in 2015 to 3,782 in 2021. Their proportion among students - 1.5%, compared with their proportion in the population - 1.7%. More than 15,000 students are ultra-Orthodox - an increase of 15%, but still their share of all students in Israel is significantly smaller than their share of the population - 4.6% compared to 13%.
The demand to study at the college also increased to a record number of undergraduate applicants last year - 51,809. An increase of close to 4,000 compared to the previous year. The most sought-after fields of study in the academic colleges are the social sciences, subjects from the field of engineering, business administration, law and computer science. Law and business administration are taught for the most part in extra-budgetary colleges, and most programs in the social sciences, computer science and engineering are taught in budgeted colleges.
In the field of engineering and architecture, the number of candidates increased from 8,271 in 1997/98 to 9,701 in 1959, while in academic colleges most of the increase was in electrical and electronics engineering and industrial and management engineering (464 and 328 out of an increase of 1,430 candidates respectively).
The recently published OECD report (September 2021) ranked Israel among the first places in the world, after Canada and Luxembourg, in the proportion of citizens aged 25-64 with post-secondary and academic education and stands at 50%. That is, half of those aged 25-64 in Israel They have a post-secondary and higher education. The budget of the higher education system is NIS 12.5 billion, compared with NIS 7.3 billion in 2009/10. The budget of the research funds increased 2.4 times in a decade from NIS 536 million to NIS 1.3 billion.