Israeli unis ‘a cheap option for English’

From the April 2012 EL Gazette

ANNUAL UNIVERSITY tuition for students in England rise to £9,000 in September, making universities in Israel – with tuition fees now at least £2,000 lower – an unexpectedly attractive proposition for students from England.

Tel Aviv University (TAU), based in Israel’s capital, recently founded TAU Trust UK. The trust’s chief executive told the Jewish Chronicle that, at a recent London trade fair, ‘so many people were enquiring about whether their son or daughter could do a full degree with us’.

Especially for students in England with Israeli family connections, a three-year English-medium TAU humanities degree at the annual equivalent of around £7,000 is suddenly worth considering.

Other Israeli institutions such as Bar-Ilan University (only £4,800 for a social sciences degree) and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya are marketing English-medium degrees to England and elsewhere.

Since this article was first published in April 2012, we've heard that students from England are expected to turn up in large numbers in Israel, the US, the Netherlands (especially Maastricht University) and Scandinavian countries in an attempt to avoid high university fees in England.

However, we've also heard from several sources that the extremely good - and largely overlooked - deal negotiated by the Lib Dem coalition partners on the terms and conditions of the UK student loans is so generous that after the hassle and expense of travel and health insurance abroad it's not really worth the bother.