The price of success: Some consequences of increased access to higher education in Israel

Access to higher education in general, and to a bachelor’s degree in particular, constitutes a major issue on the agendas of higher education systems in recent years. The end of WWII marked the global transition to higher education institutions of a democratic, open nature, and in most western countries, including Israel, the accelerated pace of this transformation in the twentieth century led to the massification of the bachelor’s degree. In the final quarter of the twentieth century, Israel’s Planning and Budgeting Committee conceived of the system of higher education as consisting of two levels: universities, with a focus on research and graduate studies, and colleges with a focus on undergraduate studies, which would serve as instruments of equality and social justice for students from the periphery through access to higher education. However, increased access affected both the new colleges and the longstanding universities, which competed among themselves, and gradually obliterated the differences between them. In this paper we discuss two specific aspects of this transformation and their implications: whether the Israeli Council of Higher Education’s major goal of increased access has been achieved and the effects of increased access to bachelor’s degree programs on the expansion of master’s degree programs.