מיהם תלמידי המכללות הטכנולוגיות? התמיינות ללימודי הנדסאות בישראל

The extensive research on the benefits of tertiary education focuses almost exclusively on academic education, ignoring for the most part the fact that tertiary education includes also vocational post-secondary programs. The purpose of the present study is to describe the differentiation of the population in Israel into practical engineering and technical studies, which constitute a major segment of non-academic higher education in Israel. Utilizing administrative data of high-school seniors in 1997 )entire population(, the study presents a comprehensive description of the social differentiation of high school graduates in Israel to all the alternatives they face in the tertiary education system: technological colleges,academic colleges and universities. Our findings confirm the general existence of a hierarchical ranking in the students’ social background and previous educational abilities, according to which the students of the technological colleges are in the middle between the students of the academic institutions and those with 12 years of study. At the same time, they point to a difference in the population of the two types of technological colleges that operate in Israel, according to which the population of the colleges under the Ministry of Education is characterized by a more solid and more homogeneous educational and social background compared to the population of the colleges under the Ministry of Labor, and to differences in the populations that specialize in the various fields of practical engineering. One of the most striking findings is the similarity between the early academic abilities of 13–14 students, mainly in the electronics major, and of academic college and university students in the low-return fields.