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Abstract
The paper examines the levels and trends in access to education and educational outcomes across generations of Egyptian youth. Examination of four cohorts of individuals aged 25–29 shows that, although basic education has democratized, some inequities in access to general secondary and college education have persisted over the past 25 years. The analysis of test scores from TIMSS and national examinations in the late 2000s shows that more than a quarter of learning outcome inequality is attributable to circumstances beyond the control of a student, such as parental education, socioeconomic background, and birthplace. The high level of overall achievement inequality observed makes inequities in learning opportunities between Egyptian youth high compared to other countries in absolute levels. Moreover, learning gaps among pupils from different backgrounds appear at early grades. High and unequal levels of household expenditures in private tutoring and tracking into vocational and general secondary schools that depend on high stakes examination substantially contribute to unequal learning outcomes.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Editor and an anonymous referee for insightful comments. We also benefited from discussions with Francisco H.G. Ferreira and Branko Milanovic, as well as the audience at a conference on equity at the World Bank. We also thank the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, Economic Research Forum and the World Bank for providing us access to some of the datasets used for this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Jérémie Gignoux http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1950-9558
Notes
1. Campante and Chor (Citation2012) argue in addition that the mismatch between the skills youth have acquired through higher educational attainments and the lack of job opportunities contributed to the protests by decreasing the opportunity cost of time devoted to political activities.
2. The LFSS 1988 was conducted by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). The ELMPS 1998, 2006 and 2012 were conducted by the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in cooperation with CAPMAS.
3. The region of residence can be considered as a circumstance variable for young people to the extent that it constitutes a proxy for the region of birth and, even when the family migrated, it probably does not reflect the decision of young individuals (independent migration should be low at young ages).
4. The tracking is determined by scores at the preparatory completion exam organized at the level of governorate.
5. A new TIMSS survey was fielded in Egypt in 2015, but the data were not available for this study.
6. We report the results for Math test scores. The results for Science are very similar and available upon request.
7. Migrations motivated by studies should be limited among 8 graders. The SYPE survey provides no information on birthplace of children less than 15.
8. The definition of urban areas is not perfectly consistent across the 2003 and 2007 surveys. The 2003 information relies on a classification of ‘communities’ by population size (communities with more than 50,000 inhabitants are classified as urban), while the 2007 information is the official classification consists in the administrative classification (which was not available in 2003).
9. This is an example of a Shapley–Shorrocks decomposition: it corresponds to the average between two alternative paths for estimating the contribution of a particular circumstance CJ to the overall variance. In the first (direct) path, all Cj, j ≠ J are held constant. In the second (residual) path, Cj is itself held constant, and its contribution is taken as the difference between the total variance and the ensuing variance. Either path is conceptually valid, and the Shapley–Shorrocks averaging procedure yields (8) as the path-independent additive decomposition. See Shorrocks (Citation1999) for the original application of the Shapley value to distributional decompositions. Ferreira and Gignoux (Citation2013) provide a formal proof that (8) is the Shapley–Shorrocks decomposition of the variance into the effects of individual circumstances.
10. The ELMPS 2012 survey also collected information on results at national exams. However, it has slightly more missing values.
11. We thank an anonymous referee for raising this point.
12. Note that the information on parental education is missing for children who do not live with their parents. For those children, parental attainment is coded in a missing category (we do not drop those observations).
13. Interestingly, the gaps by birthplace are lower at the secondary level, suggesting that the pupils who attain that level of education are already quite selected.
14. The levels of inputs and peers networks are also likely to differ across schools within a given system, so the analysis below is far from complete in capturing all the variations in schooling conditions.
15. We rely here on OLS estimates of the effects of attending different school systems. An obvious limitation is that the estimates will be biased as soon as some unobservable variables that affect learning outcomes are associated with the school system attended.
16. Introducing school-fixed effects does reduce considerably the estimates of the share of unequal opportunities – to 0.0781 for the TIMSS test score at completion of preparatory – suggesting that a large part of those inequities is captured by the attendance of different schools. However, this decrease is difficult to interpret, as it also includes the effects of living in different neighborhoods (and more generally, geography) and related family characteristics.
17. Assaad and Krafft (Citation2015) is a related recent contribution on this question.
18. This share decreases to about 50% at the secondary level, which emphasizes the link between tutoring and preparation of the preparatory completion exam.
19. In late 2007, an Egyptian Pound was about 0.18 US dollar.
20. Of course, there are quite serious identification issues here. In particular, although averaging at the family level should mitigate this concern, tutoring expenditures are likely to depend on a child's scholastic ability.