Vermont college bolsters Israeli education by degrees

This year, hundreds of Israeli teachers will earn bachelor's degrees from Vermont's Burlington College without visiting the United States.

The college's individualized degree program (IDP) in psychology is offered at nine sites in Israel, from Tel Aviv to Bakqa El-Garbia. About 610 of the one-year program's first 641 students are expected to graduate soon, says Burlington president Dan Casey.

Now in its second year, the program is open to anyone who has completed a three-year certified diploma course and satisfied its general education requirements. There are 675 new students in the program this school year, which runs from October through September.

"My assumption was that we were going to end up with 30 candidates, maybe, in Tel Aviv," says Casey. "But after we started advertising the program, we ended up with 1,500 candidates."

Burlington's program minimizes a Catch-22 in Israel's two-tier education system. Most teachers in Israel attend three-year diploma schools rather than four-year comprehensive universities, which are harder to get into. Graduates of the former are ineligible for certain incentives and pension increases open to four-year grads.

In November 1994, Abraham Aven Hen, president of Israel's largest diploma school, Modum/ISE-Consulting + Directing Ltd., approached Burlington College officials about starting an IDP program. They liked the idea. Under the schools' agreement, Modum advertises the program and provides on-site facilities and administration. Burlington provides the academic program and guarantees the Israeli students the same rights and privileges as U.S.-based students.

"Basically, what we do is deliver the program," Casey says. "It's been a good partnership for us."

The curriculum covers subjects from developmental psychology to stress management, approached from an educator's perspective. For example, the students might discuss "when a young classmate dies, what happens to the other students, and ways that teachers can respond to these things," says Thomas Verner, the IDP's academic director and a professor of psychology at Burlington. Casey says that 95 percent of the IDP students are teachers. The rest are mental health professionals or social workers.

"The people that we attracted to this program are absolutely wonderful," Casey says.

Each course meets for five hours per week in five-week modules and carries four credits. Beyond that, students attend tutorial instruction and consultation sessions. Students must also complete a directed major research project.

"The core courses are not unlike what any undergraduate psychology student would be required to take [at Burlington College]," says Verner, who helped design the curriculum and the individual courses.

The average time for completing the coursework is 14 months, Casey says, which causes many students to have second thoughts.

"We lose people," Casey says, "because when they come in, they discover there's a lot more to it than they thought and drop out."

All instruction is in Hebrew. But other components of the program, primarily those involving research, are in English. Casey says 26 faculty members and 16 tutors were hired before the first year. Of this group, "nearly half of them had Ph.D.s, most of them at American universities." All were psychologists, but, Verner says, "we tried to hire people who were not only practicing psychology" but teaching, too. The program's current acting dean, Gaby Kovac of Ra'anana, was just an instructor the first year.

Most classes have diverse student populations, Casey says. The classes in Beersheva, for example, have Jews, Arabs and Bedouins.

The program is also helping Burlington College and Israel forge an even stronger connection. Some staff members from Israel are teaching undergraduate courses at Burlington. And next fall, Burlington College will begin offering a two-year graduate degree in transpersonal studies in Israel. Burlington recently registered the program with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, an accrediting agency.