One exam has ruled Egyptian teenagers’ fates for decades and fed one of the country’s biggest private industries — now it has a rival. An Education Ministry official tells EnterpriseAM that opt-in for the new Egyptian Baccalaureate has hit 99% for the 2026-27 academic year, with roughly 832k students choosing the track over Thanaweya Amma. The official credits a system built to deliver “solutions to the problems facing Thanaweya Amma, including reducing reliance on private lessons and tutoring centers, and easing the financial burden on Egyptian families.”

Easing the burden of private tutoring fees has always been central to the reform. Parliamentary and Legal Affairs Minister Mahmoud Fawzy told the House Education Committee in July 2025 that the reform was being pursued in an effort to “eliminate the phenomenon of private tutoring that burdens Egyptian families” and to “relieve the burden and hardship on Egyptian families,” according to a statement.

The baccalaureate system was designed based on international models, but it deliberately preserves Arabic-language and national-identity subjects in the Egyptian version, the official says.

AI is also playing a role: The ministry piloted an AI-powered platform aimed at cutting reliance on private lessons. This isn’t the first time the ministry has utilized AI. Egyptian AI-tutoring startup Faheem, whose curriculum-aligned platform helps students study and revise, previously told EnterpriseAM its performance data feeds into Education Ministry analytics used to guide investment and policy decisions.

The baccalaureate system reduces the need for tutoring by offering fewer subjects. Dr. Hassan Sayed Shehata, a contributor to the baccalaureate’s curriculum development and professor of Curricula and Teaching Methods at Ain Shams University’s Faculty of Education, tells EnterpriseAM the number of subjects drops sharply by design: five subjects in the first year, four in the second, and just two by the third, with neither Arabic nor English among them by then. For the final year, “the student won’t need private tutoring,” Shehata says.

The curriculum is still being updated as enrollment continues to grow. “We’ve just finished the new curricula, and they’re now under review ahead of publication,” Shehata says. He describes an Arabic-literature curriculum built around 20 topics, plus a separate booklet on narrative writing, an English curriculum matched to International Baccalaureate standards, and a math curriculum modeled on Japanese and Korean systems, with each trimmed to nine topics per term.

Teacher training and textbook review are running on separate tracks. Governorate-level video-conference sessions prepare high-performing teachers, who then pass that training on to colleagues elsewhere, Shehata says. That’s distinct from Education Minister Abdel Latif’s agreement with the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO), which reviews the frameworks behind the new textbooks rather than classroom delivery.

The system is designed to funnel students into four tracks that correlate to job-market demand: Medicine and Life Sciences, Engineering and Computer Science, Business, and Arts and Humanities. All four are tied to university majors, and students have the option to add more subjects and pursue more than one track.

Final exams are at no charge, though retakes have a fee. Grade 11 students sit a first attempt in May at no charge, with a second in July; Grade 12 students sit their first attempt in June, also at no charge, with a second in August. Every subsequent attempt carries a flat EGP 500 exam fee, waived for low-income students drawn from the ministry’s own case database, Abdel Latif told the House Education Committee in January 2025.

The final exams cover seven subjects worth a total of 700 points, with one exception. Each subject is scored out of 100, with the higher of two attempts counted toward the total. Religious Education is the exception: it carries its own 70% passing threshold and sits outside the 700-point total entirely, according to Abdel Latif’s July 2025 statement.

How the four tracks will correlate to university majors is still being decided by the Supreme Council of Universities, per Fawzy’s July 2025 statement. According to Shehata, this gap between tracks and majors is part of how the new system is building stronger ties to labor-market needs. That echoes Higher Education Minister Ayman Ashour’s comments linking the reform to Egypt’s push into AI, genomic medicine, and big data in July 2025.

Students will also have the option to attend a foundational year of university after their final retake, which allows them to begin attendance before choosing a faculty, Shehata says. This is similar to the American university model, which allows students to wait until their second year of university to declare a major.

The baccalaureate system is quickly outpacing Thanaweya Amma in enrollment. Our source at the Education Ministry put the opt-in rate at 99% for the 2026-27 academic year, up from the 95% rate Abdel Latif referenced in May, an increase which is likely explained by weeks of continued sign-ups since then.

One industry insider is willing to call an end date for the old way. Private School Owners Association Chairman Badawy Allam tells EnterpriseAM he expects “next year to be the last year for administering Thanaweya Amma exams alongside the first year of the two-year baccalaureate exams,” given how many incoming students are choosing the new track. Allam says the shift is already squeezing tutoring-center revenue by trimming subjects and narrowing what counts toward passing and claims it has saved the state a significant sum on exam administration — a figure the ministry hasn’t confirmed.

REMEMBER- The reform was set in motion last year after Parliament amended the Education Law in July 2025. President Abdel Fattah El Sisi signed it into force as Law 169 of 2025, published in the Official Gazette in August 2025, with the Supreme Council of Pre-University Education and the Supreme Council of Universities separately signing off later that month. A survey of private schools last October found 100% of students had chosen the baccalaureate, with Allam calling Thanaweya Amma’s decline “inevitable” at the time. Private and international universities have also seen increased applications from students who did not receive their desired grades from Thanaweya Amma; one university head said his school received 900 applications within two hours of the Thanaweya Amma results being announced.

But some are still skeptical: In one Facebook thread for incoming students, replies topped 40, most sticking with Thanaweya Amma. One argued there’s no clear “best” system between the two, criticizing the baccalaureate for an unclear curriculum this close to the school year and predicting harder university-admission coordination under a newer, less-tested system. Another described feeling “forced” into the baccalaureate track. These posts are anecdotal and unverified — the group is private and its name withheld for privacy — but they’re a small signal that public sentiment may not completely align with official numbers.

The commercial question no one has answered: Whether a two-year, multi-retake system nets out to less tutoring spending overall or simply stretches the same spending across two years instead of one remains unresolved. Egypt’s private tutoring market was valued at roughly USD 0.78 bn in 2024 and is projected to nearly triple to USD 1.75 bn by 2033, per a January 2026 Deep Market Insights report — a private-sector estimate, not a government figure, set before this reform had time to bite.

OUR TAKE- Adoption numbers are the easy victory; governments always have those. The harder number is the one nobody’s produced: actual tutoring spending from before and after the reform took place. Until that shows up, the near-universal opt-in tells us families have chosen a track, but it doesn’t tell us that the track has delivered what it promised. Allam’s prediction that Thanaweya Amma is in its last year assumes the new system has delivered on those promises, but its true life expectancy will depend on the data.

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