Asked what classes were like in her last year of high school, the fateful period when students across the country cram for Egypt’s life-defining national exams, Nermin Abouzeid looked blank for a second. “We don’t actually know because she never went to high school,” explained her mother, Manal Abouzeid, 47. A child of the dusty alleyways of a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Cairo, she was determined, by middle school, to become a cardiologist. But medical schools accept only the top scorers on the national exams. She abandoned Egypt’s chronically overcrowded and underfunded schools midway through middle school, joining millions of other students in private tutoring, where the same teachers who were paid too little at school to bother teaching could make multiples of their day-job salaries on exam-prep classes.

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Persons: Nermin Abouzeid, ”, Manal Abouzeid Locations: Cairo