The Ministry of Finance headed by Dr. Yuval Steinitz, the Minister of Education and Chairman of the CHE MK Gideon Sa’ar, the Chairman of the PBC Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, and the Official in Charge of Wages in the Ministry of Finance Mr. Ilan Levine, have approved a program for strengthening publicly-funded academic colleges that will encourage senior academic staff to teach in colleges, with a focus on colleges in peripheral areas, in order to give a boost to these institutions.

The program is part of the collective agreement signed with the colleges, that allowed for special employment of senior staff. Every institution can employ in this framework up to 15% of its senior academic positions. The program will make it possible to improve the salary of senior academic staff who choose to teach in publicly-funded colleges and will grant economic incentives to a faculty member who moves from abroad to Israel or who moves from his place of residence to a community that is located in the periphery and close to the college.

The incentives will be given as grants of up to NIS 200,000 for each senior academic staff member for moving and attendant costs for the purposes of the relocation and acclimatization. The program is underway and is in effect as of this month. The cost of the program is estimated to be in the NIS millions.

The Ministers Sa’ar and Steinitz welcomed the agreement and added that it will lead to the recruitment to the colleges’ staff of tens of new Israeli lecturers from the best universities and research institutes abroad, thus raising the academic level of the colleges and their graduates.