More than 1,600 people complete a doctorate in Israel each year, but the academy has room to employ only a small percentage of them. What will everyone else do? And how can a small program to improve the quality of life and the environment in Israel help change that?
By Maya Falah, Angle, Science and Environment News Agency
When the new academic school year began, among the tens of thousands of excited students who began their studies at the various universities in Israel, there were many anxious students for a Ph.D. The increasing number of PhD graduates does sound like a reason for a party - the logic says that a more educated country is a stronger country, but is this really the case? Another 1,600 people will complete their third degree at Israeli universities this year, but many of them, as it turns out, will find themselves without an employment option suitable for their skills.
Dr. Amir Fink, graduate of a PhD in archeology from Tel Aviv University and a graduate of the Mendel School for Educational Leadership, has been serving as director in recent years Interface program - Plan from the foundation of The Israeli Association for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, which integrates doctors (with PhDs from various fields of education) in government offices for a year as scientific advisors, with the aim of improving the quality of life and the environment in Israel. As part of his work, Fink examined the integration of PhD holders in the labor market in Israel in recent years, and he has interesting and worrying insights. "Over 1,600 researchers receive a doctorate in Israel each year (according to the data of the National Council for Higher Education)," says Fink. "This is astronomical growth: this number has increased 7.5 times in the last 40 years, while the population in Israel has increased only 2.5 times during this period."
Fink explains that while many exams are good and true for Israel, whose population is becoming more educated, the doctorate is an elusive tool in terms of our ability as a society to take advantage of it, since it is apparently dedicated training for integration into the academic system, but the academy only needs a very small percentage of the doctors it trains. Only about 7-8 percent of all third degree graduates in Israel can integrate into the academic system in terms of the number of standards available. So what will everyone else do?
According to Fink, this is a market failure: the country produces a much larger workforce than it needs (which is also joined by quite a few PhD graduates from abroad, which the academy sometimes tends to prefer). Those who fail to integrate into the academy remain in a problem, because they do not always manage to find employment outside the academy that matches their education and salary expectations in the Israeli labor market - certainly not employment that justifies the many years of study, investment and sacrifice. "After removing those who join the academy, we are dealing with approximately 1,500 people each year who are from the top of the human capital that the State of Israel has, for whom there is no clear plan," says Fink. "No one really directs them (the universities in Israel do not do this), and workplaces often do not know how to eat them, since they have spent the last few years acquiring a seemingly very specific specialization. As a result, many of these doctors do not manage to receive the salary they deserve, they do not use the knowledge and abilities they have gained for the good of the common good - they simply cannot find themselves. Quite a few of them go for a post-doctorate abroad, and then find a position there in the academy (or outside of it). In other words, we are losing a significant part of the human capital that we finance and train in Israel, simply because we cannot offer them a suitable offer for employment.'
A restless archaeologist
Our new doctors find it difficult to integrate not only in the academy, but also in the civil service. Israel is the OECD country with the lowest percentage of PhD graduates who join the civil service and the public service. Only a few of the third degree graduates are included among them. "This also happens because the salaries in the public service are relatively low compared to their salary expectations," explains Fink, "but mainly because the public service not only does not know how to absorb them - but has a whole set of barriers that stop them from joining it today. The system is such that it does not perceive academic experience as an advantage - but it does perceive practical experience in industry or in the field as such - and in fact it creates a buffer between this thing that we invest so much in and which brings us so many benefits in our daily lives - the Israeli academy and science, and the public service."
Fink's own personal story is a representative example of this problem: he graduated in archeology from the University of Tel Aviv and Chicago, who had to reinvent himself in the world outside of academia. "My great love for archeology began at a very young age, before I was 15 I was already on several archaeological digs," he says. "It was clear to me that I would be an archaeologist. I finished my PhD and managed excavations in Turkey and it was a great experience. I enjoyed what I was doing and everything was fine and dandy - but something else was burning in me. I was approaching 40 years old and realized that I was looking for something different in life. I really liked and still really like archeology, but I realized that I want to act in other arenas as well. So I separated from the world of action in this field in search of another arena of influence.'
Fink chose to start the new path at the Mandel School of Educational Leadership. "At Mendel I was exposed to the field of sustainability and the environment, and I came to the conclusion that this is the most significant issue facing us today - that no matter what we do or don't do in other areas, if we don't deal with this issue all the other things will be irrelevant," he says. "Another insight I had there was that the way to achieve change is by integrating more good people into the system, because the basis of any change is people. In Israel, quite a few good people have avoided the public arena, either in politics or in the civil service. The interface program that I manage today is perfect from these two aspects: it includes both the promotion of the environment and sustainability in Israel, and the improvement of the public sector by integrating quality personnel into it.'
affect the quality of life
Fink says that the interface program succeeds in turning the failure of the academic market in Israel into an extraordinary opportunity for doctors to find avenues of employment for their benefit and the benefit of the public. Mashek gives the fellows of the program training in all the fields that are not studied at the university - life skills of various kinds, broad knowledge in the fields of the environment, society and government in Israel, as well as diverse tools for personal empowerment, and places them as scientific-environmental consultants in the service of the state. Many of them integrate at the end of the program as civil servants, who bring new blood and up-to-date scientific knowledge to the service of the state. Very recently, the program even won the prestigious prize of the Knesset Speaker's Foundation for the Quality of Life for 2017.
"Mamasach was born to produce an innovative and special change model for the environment in Israel, and its role is to help the various government ministries design their environmental policy in a science-based way," explains Fink. "What happened is that a situation was created here in which everyone benefits: this is a way to combine for a year those high-quality and educated people in positions in the civil service, to help the senior officials in the government ministries who are in dire need of this help, and also to strengthen and improve the decision-making that is carried out in the field of the environment in Israel. With the help of the program, the civil service saw that it was good and they realize more and more that they lack such people - who know excellent English, know how to research and read professional literature and also understand the content itself. There are quite a few excellent people in the civil service, but this layer needs to be strengthened, especially in the area of the environment - which is one of the areas that always remains at the end of the day, at the bottom of the order of priorities.'
Today, after the program has already qualified 55 graduates and is currently in its seventh cycle, more than half of its graduates are integrated into the state service and the public service in permanent jobs. "I think the program gives the colleagues a great satisfaction, and shows them the power they have in their hands and the ability to move things through their knowledge, their analytical ability and their work," says Fink. "A doctorate produces a person who is knowledgeable, but also one who often feels at the end of the doctorate a little disconnected from the world of action. Our colleagues are people who have realized that in a short time not only can they enter the world of action - but also that they can have a big impact on it, that their science is not disconnected from reality - but something that has power and that they can use it for good." Registration for the eighth cycle of the program, by the way, is currently underway.
"I think it fits very nicely with the social protest that was here in 2011, and with the desire of more and more people to be involved in what is happening in the country," he concludes. "We offer PhD graduates an option that entails enormous satisfaction, as well as the ability to influence the fate of the people in the country. This indicates something about those 1,600 doctors, that society in Israel today does not know how to offer them the place they deserve. Because it is a relatively strong group, no one worries about them. And these people do manage, but we - as a society - lose.'
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