Private Tutoring and the Inequality Crisis in Egypt

Every afternoon in Cairo, as the final bell rings, students pour out of school buildings only to enter another educational world, one that is unregulated, expensive, and increasingly essential. These “shadow classrooms,” Egypt’s vast private tutoring system, have become so normalized that many students consider school optional and tutoring mandatory. But behind this parallel system lies a troubling truth: relying on private instruction to compensate for public-school shortcomings deepens inequality, not achievement.

Egypt’s public education system is one of the largest in the world, serving more than 20 million students. Yet chronic overcrowding, sometimes 60 to 70 students per classroom, makes individualized instruction nearly impossible. Teachers, often underpaid and expected to work multiple jobs, struggle to manage large groups or incorporate active learning methods. As a result, many lessons become rote, exam-oriented, and hurried, leaving students with significant gaps in comprehension. Families, desperate to secure high exam scores that determine university placement, turn to private tutors as a lifeline.

The tutoring market has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Group sessions can involve hundreds of students crowded into lecture halls, taught by celebrity tutors whose popularity rivals influencers. Parents often spend a large portion of their income on these sessions, hoping to secure better grades for their children. For wealthier families, private tutoring is an investment. For lower-income families, it is a burden, and often an impossible one. Many students must choose between attending tutoring or contributing to household income, particularly in rural regions where poverty is pervasive.

The result is predictable but devastating: students with financial means consistently outperform those who cannot afford tutoring, not necessarily because they are more capable, but because they had access to the “real” education occurring after school hours. Meanwhile, public schools lose credibility and authority. Attendance drops. Motivation declines. The educational system splits in two: the official one, underfunded and overwhelmed, and the unofficial one, expensive and exclusionary.

This dynamic erodes not just academic outcomes, but social cohesion. In a country where nearly one-third of children live in poverty, educational disparity becomes a predictor of lifelong inequality. When success depends on purchasing supplemental education, the promise of upward mobility weakens. Students who cannot afford tutoring fall behind through no fault of their own, limiting their university options and employment prospects. Over time, inequality hardens into intergenerational disadvantage.

Recent policy attempts aim to regulate the industry, such as banning large tutoring centers and encouraging schools to offer supervised, low-cost after-school sessions. But these reforms face implementation challenges. Parents distrust the quality of school-led alternatives, teachers rely on tutoring income, and students remain trapped between necessity and affordability. Without systemic changes like improving teacher pay, reducing class sizes, and strengthening public instructional quality, cracking down on tutoring simply removes a coping mechanism without addressing its root cause.

The rise of Egypt’s shadow-classroom economy illustrates a broader truth: when formal educational systems fail, parallel markets emerge, benefitting those who can pay and leaving the rest behind. Addressing this crisis requires more than restricting tutoring; it requires restoring faith in public education itself. Until then, the divide between students who learn and students who are left out will continue to grow, one tutoring session at a time.