ISRAEL

Arab students now have greater say in integration plan

In order to retain their funding for empowering Arab students, academic institutions in Israel must now appoint an Arab student to the steering committees working on increasing integration of Arabs into society, a subcommittee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel decided, writes Yarden Skop for Haaretz.

The subcommittee, part of the council’s subcommittee on funding, is in charge of implementing a five-year plan to benefit Arabs and other minorities. The plan, known by its full name as the plan for “expansion of accessibility to Arab, Druze and Circassian society”, is to receive ILS900 million (US$248 million) in funding for the next five years, three times the funding it received for the previous five-year period.

The proposal to place Arab students on the steering committees was made by the national student union after it was discovered that the Council for Higher Education and its funding subcommittee were giving the money for the five-year plan to the institutions, but the money was not always being effectively used.
Full report on Haaretz site