The Israeli government has made a decision to ban foreign students from studying in Israeli medical schools.

The decision is the result of the 2018 recommendation of Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE) due to the fact that a large number of Israelis are forced to travel to Europe for medical school after not being accepted into Israeli schools. Only about 900 Israelis are admitted to medical school per year but the Health Ministry is now planning on increasing the number to 1,200.

The medical schools that accepted foreign students are Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Ben-Gurion University’s (BGU) Faculty of Health Sciences in Be’er Sheva, and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine in Haifa.

BGU president Prof. Daniel Chamovitz told The Jerusalem Post: “There was no choice. We need more Israelis to study medicine here. BGU will close the New York office where foreigners applied for admission in Beersheba. Our American supporters will surely be disappointed by the decision, and the medical school will maintain its English instruction to help immigrants and returning Israelis who prefer studying in that language. But those who worked in our international school will teach Israelis instead of foreigners. Nothing will change.”

Former BGU president Prof. Rivka Carmi told the Post that the government decision was “very regrettable, but there was no choice. There is a shortage of physicians and a lack of hospitals and professors available for clinical teaching. The Assuta Ashdod University Hospital – the only new medical center to be built in 40 years – is a community hospital with only 300 beds. The lack of hospitals for clinical teaching is the bottleneck. A second hospital, in addition to Soroka-University Medical Center, is planned for Be’er Sheva, but that will be built in a decade, if we’re lucky.”

“I was very enthusiastic about these programs for foreign students when I was BGU’s medical dean and president, but in recent years, I saw the problems of training enough Israeli physicians and realized that there is no choice,” she said. “It was the right decision not to accept foreign medical students in the future. I think there is no choice but to support the decision but I say it with a heavy heart.”

Foreign medical students in Israel didn’t get a financial break, paying about the same tuition -about $40,000-$50,000 –  as medical schools in the US and Canada.

Israeli students pay a heavily subsidized tuition of NIS 13,000 a year.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)