The impact of Israeli participatory program on success of its students

ABSTRACT

Israel has worked to improve the accessibility of its higher education to under-served communities, but lower socioeconomic students, as well as those of certain ethnic backgrounds, remain disadvantaged. Unfortunately, some ‘second chance’ programs developed to help facilitate admission to higher education have only increased this inequality. The following research evaluates the Sami Shamoon College of Engineering pre-academic program as a gateway for these marginalized populations to access higher education. An index is developed to visualize the clusters of socioeconomic status among geographic area and region as well as participation in the pre-academic program. The descriptive and statistical analysis looks at the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of current undergraduate students that participated in the pre-academic program as well as their yearly GPA versus their counterparts. Discussion surrounds income inequality and both higher education accessibility as well as labour market prospects for graduates from vulnerable populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Income inequality
• wealth gap
• Israel higher education
• arab
• jew
• pre-academic program

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neta Kela Madar

Dr. Neta Kela Madar has more 15 years of experience in global business development and innovation and entrepreneurship education in advanced healthcare technologies. Dr. Kela has extensive experience in developing innovation and disruptive technologies in life science industry with proven clinical background in immunology, immunotherapy and drug development from the Stanford University (CA, USA). Dr. Kela holds a PhD in immunology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and won The McCormick Award from the Stanford University and serves as the CEO of the Innovation accelerator and the head of Innovation and entrepreneurship program and senior faculty in SCE (engineering College). Dr. Kela is the author and inventor of academic papers and serves as scientific adviser in the ScienceAbroad and ISPIM science and innovation organizations. Dr. Kela invited as an innovation expert in the media (YNET, GLOBES, MAARIV, CHANNEL 10 and more) organizations (National Cyber Institute, Science Abroad, Blender) and academic institute (Tel-Aviv Academic institute, McGill University).

Avshalom Danoch

Dr. Avshalom Danoch, who holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial and management engineering. The topic of Ph.d thesis is: business characteristics that encourage civil court proceedings Dr. Danoch is the head of the Academic administration for the past ten years at SCE, Sami Shamoon College of Engineering. Among other things, he is responsible for the following units: Pre-Academic Preparations, Registration unit, Academic Secretariat, Examination unit, and Student Administration unit. As part of his role as a key partner in the assimilation and implementation of the College’s vision of promoting knowledge and fostering excellence among different populations, thus bringing about the prosperity of the society. Among other tasks, he promotes and fosters disadvantaged populations in order to study and succeed in college education in order to advance in the society and shatter the frameworks in which they were born. Among the other populations it cultivates are the ultra-Orthodox, Ethiopian and Bedouin communities. In recent years a researcher in the field of higher education policy.