Heshbon · Center for Data in Jewish Life · Colleges and universities, essay 7
About $36,000 for the average Orthodox program that prints its tuition, before the flight: posted tuition of about $32,000 plus a college fee, insurance and pocket money. Of eighty-five yeshivot, seminaries and year programs, sixteen print this year's tuition where a family can read it, and fifty-two print nothing at all.
Select the student and the kind of program, then the schools you are considering. For each one you will get what its own pages say about tuition, its price history where we could recover one, a budget where the school gives enough to build one, and what comes back through the college.
1. The student, and the kind of program
2. Which schools are you thinking about?
Tuition: posted price for one academic year, US dollars. Shekel prices converted at 3.005, marked with an asterisk. Status: TUITION POSTED means this year's price on the school's own site; PAST YEAR or UNDATED an older own price; DIRECTORY a Masa listing only; NOT SHOWN nothing anywhere. Remarks are what the school's own pages say.
What does the school say the year costs?
We looked for this year's tuition on the website of each of eighty-five programs: the forty-two on Yeshiva University's Israel list, thirty-nine haredi yeshivot and seminaries on the Touro and Hebrew Theological College lists, and the four largest non-Orthodox year programs. Where the site had nothing we checked Masa's directory and the Internet Archive.
Each bar is one group of programs: blue is this year's tuition on the school's own site, light blue a past or undated one, hatched a Masa directory entry, gray nothing.
Fig 1. Who prints tuition
Share of programs by where a price could be found, by group. Stacked bars, with the number in each segment a count of programs.
Where tuition is printed it averages $34,300 across the sixteen: $32,000 at the men's yeshivot on YU's list, $37,500 at the women's seminaries, $29,000 and $28,800 at the haredi yeshivot and seminaries, $38,200 at the non-Orthodox programs. The groups differ less in price than in whether a family gets to see it.
Programs with this year's tuition come first in each group, then those with an older or directory price, then those with none, with a note where a fee, a payment link or a 2014 price is all the school has left in public.
The Masa directory prices. Schools type these themselves. Where a school also posts its own price the two match, to the dollar at Migdal HaTorah and within 4 percent at MMY and HaRova. They are marked as directory prices because the school chose to say the number to Masa and not to you.
Prices that look current. Lindenbaum's aid page still reads "Tuition for the 2018-19 academic year is 98,000 shekel." Bircas HaTorah gives 96,000 shekels for a ten-month year and no year at all, on a page last modified this February. Toras Chaim's FAQ prices registration at $500, insurance at $595 and trips up to $500 and never names the tuition.
Is the price really going up, or is the dollar going down?
Mostly the dollar. Five dollar-priced programs left a dated series of their own prices, on archived pages or old application forms, between two and twelve years long. For each we took the change per year, then averaged. The top bar is the posted price, the gray bar what American consumer prices did over the same years, the bottom bar what is left after inflation.
Fig 2. How fast dollar tuition rises, averaged
Average annual change across the five dollar-priced programs with a dated price series, against CPI-U over the same years. Our arithmetic throughout.
Dollar tuition, in other words, has tracked the grocery bill. The one posted number that breaks the pattern is next year's: one seminary has already posted a 21 percent step for 2027-28.
A shekel ticket is different. The next chart sets the two shekel-priced seminaries to 100 in 2021-22 and follows three lines: their tuition in shekels, the same tuition in the dollars a family sent at each August's exchange rate, and American consumer prices. The rates run along the bottom.
Fig 3. Shekel tuition, in shekels and in dollars
The shekel-priced seminaries averaged, index 2021-22 = 100, at each August's average exchange rate, against CPI-U. Every figure is our arithmetic.
Since 2023-24 shekel tuition has risen about 5 percent a year in shekels and 13 percent a year in the dollars a family sends, against inflation of about 3. A family paying in dollars is budgeting for the exchange rate whether it knows it or not.
The deflator. CPI-U for August of each year, the month a family pays. August 2021 to August 2026 is a rise of 22.4 percent, and August 2014 to August 2026, 40.8 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics published no October 2025 index, so August-to-August comparisons avoid the gap.
The rate. A dollar bought 3.22 shekels in August 2021, 3.75 in August 2023 and 2.99 in August 2026, the strongest August reading in the series since 2006. The monthly averages are the OECD series carried by the St. Louis Fed. The IRS yearly average for 2025 is 3.451. MMY's tuition is about $42,600 at the Bank of Israel rate used on the board and $42,781 at August's average; the two differ only in which day's rate is used.
So what is the real total?
For each of the sixteen programs that print tuition we built the same budget: the tuition, the fees the school and the college publish, an insurance range where the school bills it separately, pocket money on one seminary's published guidance, less the college's rebate. The chart averages those budgets in three groups. Blue is tuition, light blue the published fees, hatched the estimated extras, gray the part that comes back. The flight is missing because no school prices it.
Fig 4. The average year, by kind of program
Sixteen program budgets averaged in three groups, 2026-27 tuition, US dollars, airfare excluded. The totals are our arithmetic.
Posted tuition is about nine tenths of the Orthodox year. On top sit the college's fee to put the year on a transcript, $3,500 at Yeshiva University with $2,000 back and $1,100 to $1,500 at Touro with $550 back, an insurance policy most schools require and few price, and pocket money that one seminary puts at $200 to $250 a month. One program's tuition includes the flight and every meal, at $64,900.
Two programs can post the same tuition and send different bills. A filled square is covered, a half-tone square partly covered, a hollow square billed separately or left to the family, a dotted square routed through a partner college at its own fee, gray unstated.
What posted tuition includes
Twenty-one priced programs by five budget items, grouped by kind of program.
Not much, and most of it local. Each bar is a published award. Blue can be spent on a gap year, gray cannot, and the orange outline is a loan.
What the community pays toward the year
Published federation and named-fund awards, US dollars, sorted by size.
Does the year count toward college, and what is that worth?
Each bar is one American college and the credits it counts for the year. The lighter extensions are ceilings: Touro's with a second year, Queens College's when the school is an accredited college, Fairleigh Dickinson's with exam credits. The zeros are refusals in writing. Where we have it, a year of the college's tuition follows the bar, because that is what the credit is worth.
Fig 5. How much of the year counts when the student comes home
Credits counted for one year of Israel study, by receiving institution, with one year of that institution's full-time tuition for 2026-27. The tuition figures are our arithmetic.
$49,550one year of Yeshiva University tuition, 2026-27, the year a Stern student who did Israel does not attend
So: what does a year in Israel cost, and who tells you before you choose a destination? About $36,000 for the average Orthodox program that prints its tuition, $35,000 to $36,000 at the men's yeshivot and $36,000 to $37,000 at the women's seminaries, $41,000 to $42,000 at the co-educational and non-Orthodox programs, all before the flight. Only sixteen of eighty-five programs print tuition where you can read it, every non-Orthodox program among them and five of the thirty-nine haredi ones. Go home to YU, Touro, Hebrew Theological College, Brooklyn or Queens and some or all of a year of college tuition comes off the other end. At YU that year costs more than the year in Israel did. Go home to Rutgers, Maryland, Penn's Jewish Studies program, Brandeis or a college with no policy and nothing comes off: a fifth year of tuition, paid to a school that in most cases never told you the price until it accepted your child.
The 32. YU's catalog records the Israel year as block credit without grades, counting toward the 128 credits of the degree and not toward the 84 that must be earned in New York, so a Stern student who spent a year in Israel finishes in six semesters on campus. The count itself, 32, is in YU's fall 2026 email to families, which is on file, and on the FAQs of Hakotel, Sha'alvim for Women, Bnot Torah and Ateret. It is still not on YU's public pages.
Two Touro numbers. Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, a Touro affiliate on the same fee schedule, says 30 credits where the Lander colleges say 36. Touro's 36 includes 24 graded into the average. Brooklyn's 27 post only after a B or better in an on-campus Judaic Studies course.
The silent majority. We read the transfer-credit pages of twenty-one more universities, from Binghamton and Columbia to Michigan and UCLA. None mentions a yeshiva or seminary; all require an accredited institution, which a yeshiva is not. Binghamton, often described as friendly to Israel credits, publishes nothing that says so. Only two outside the chart say yes with a number, Queens College and Fairleigh Dickinson, and two say no, Penn's Jewish Studies program and Brandeis.
heshbon, a reckoning: what this data does not show
The wall is a census of Yeshiva University's list and a sample of the rest: nineteen haredi yeshivot and twenty haredi seminaries from lists that run longer. Every shekel conversion, every average in Figs 2 to 4 and the tuition figures in Fig 5 are our arithmetic. The growth rates average five dollar-priced series of unequal length and two shekel-priced ones, and the budgets average sixteen programs built on one rule. No Masa amount appears, because Masa publishes none, and no airfare, because no official average exists. The 32 credits at YU come from YU's own email to families and four affiliates' FAQs, not from YU's website. A registrar saying the block credit is smaller, or a bill far from a posted tuition, would overturn the piece; neither call was made.
The wall holds eighty-five programs: YU's forty-two affiliates as listed on September 6, 2026; nineteen haredi yeshivot from the Touro and HTC lists, capped at twenty and reduced by one because Ohr Somayach's Derech is also on YU's list; twenty haredi seminaries from Touro's forty-six-name list, capped at twenty of the thirty that YU does not carry; and four non-Orthodox programs chosen by size. The seminaries left off, such as Hadar and Chemdas, look like the ones kept: no website, or a website with no price.
The years differ by ticket and every ticket says which. Sixteen own-site prices describe 2025-26 or later. Seven describe an earlier or unstated year. Ten appear only in Masa's directory or a program-supplied listing. The 2014 figures on the blank stubs come from a single Excelsior College cost-of-attendance table and are there to show that a price once existed, not what it is now.
Shekels are converted at the Bank of Israel rate of 3.0050 on September 4, 2026 for the tickets and at OECD monthly averages for Fig 3. Restated dollars in Fig 2 use CPI-U for August of each year and omit Migdal HaTorah's second 2022-23 price and Michlalah's 2027-28 price, for which there is no index yet. An earlier draft read Stern's requirements sheet as a four-year clock; the sheet's residence rule of six semesters is the one that governs degree length.
Where sources disagreed: Migdal HaTorah's page carried $28,500 and later $30,000 for 2022-23, and the first is used. Touro's Lander colleges say 36 credits and HTC says 30, and both are shown. Ohr Somayach's live page says $28,500 for 2025-26 while an undated PDF says $18,000 with room and board. The live, year-stamped page is on the wall. YU's tuition page states a 2026-27 total its own line items contradict; the line items are used.
Sources. Retrieved September 6, 2026 for YU's list, Touro, the subsidy documents and the baseline rates, and September 24, 2026 for the Internet Archive captures, the haredi rosters and the price indexes.
Yeshiva University: S. Daniel Abraham Israel Program admissions page listing 42 affiliates and the $3,500 fee, 2026-27; Office of Student Finance tuition and fees, 2026-27; undergraduate catalog, Israel Program supplement, 2020-2022; general education requirements sheet, fall 2023; email to Israel program families, fall 2026 (32 credits), on file with the author. Touro University, Lander College of Arts and Sciences and Lander College for Women, Israel Option pages, participating-school lists and tuition, 2026-27. Hebrew Theological College, Israel Option page and yeshiva list. Brooklyn College Transfer Evaluations Office and Bursar. Queens College undergraduate admissions FAQ. Fairleigh Dickinson University, Yeshiva and Seminary degree-completion BA. Rutgers Department of Jewish Studies. University of Maryland Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies. University of Pennsylvania Jewish Studies Program transfer-credit policy. Brandeis University Registrar, transfer credit for work before enrollment. Binghamton University, Harpur College transfer-credit policy. Thomas Edison State University and the NCCRS course-credit directory. Transfer-credit pages of twenty-one further universities, listed in the companion, retrieved September 24, 2026.
School price pages, with Internet Archive captures where noted: Migdal HaTorah, Michlalah, MMY (annual financial forms 5782 to 5787), Midreshet HaRova, Amudim, Israel XP at Bar-Ilan, Ohr Somayach Derech, Midreshet Eshel, Bnot Torah, Netiv Aryeh, Midreshet AMIT, Midreshet Lindenbaum, Midreshet Moriah, Midreshet Tehillah; Aderes HaTorah (application page, 2026-27, and 2014 application PDF); Bircas HaTorah tuition policy; Toras Simcha; Toras Chaim FAQ; Nachlas Bais Yaakov and Tehilas Bais Yaakov acceptance pages, 2026-27; Beit Chana financial information, 5787; Darchei Binah Hachadash application, 2025-26; Excelsior College, Israel Study Abroad 2014 cost-of-attendance table; Aardvark Israel and Nativ tuition pages, 2026-27 and 2027-28; Young Judaea Year Course tuition, 2027-28; Kivunim admissions, 2025-26. Masa Israel Journey program directory listings, 2026-27 and 2027 sessions.
Subsidy documents: Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta; Jewish Free Loan Association; Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest NJ, Alisa Flatow Memorial Scholarship; Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, Israel Quest; Jewish Federation of Cleveland; Combined Jewish Philanthropies; UJA-Federation of New York. Federal Student Aid Handbook 2024-25; 34 CFR 668.39; IRS Publication 970.
Baseline inputs: Bank of Israel representative rate, September 4, 2026; IRS yearly average exchange rates, 2021 to 2025; OECD monthly average shekel rates via FRED series CCUSMA02ILM618N; Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U, all items, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED series CPIAUCNS. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Air Fares, consulted and found to cover domestic routes only.
The methodology companion, with the eleven data tables, every URL consulted including the ones that came up empty, and the arithmetic behind each estimate, is available as a separate download.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.