 I'm from Egypt. I worked as a consultant for the Population Council. The title of the paper I'm presenting today is Access within the Higher Education System in Egypt, Evidence for More Inequality of Opportunity, and this is joint work with Caroline Kraft and Dr. Raghia Sadbot at the University of Minnesota. So, I'll start with talking a little bit about the motivation for the paper. First, this paper is part of a book and the book is entitled Does Free Education in Egypt Lead to Equality of Opportunity? The Arabic version of the book is already available and the English version is close to finalization and it's produced by the Population Council and funded by Ford Foundation. So, basically the Higher Education System in Egypt is a free system. So, there is free public higher education and it is a meritocratic system so access to university exclusively depends on the score you get at the end of high school. So, the question we're asking in the book and in the paper given the nature of the system is really equality of opportunity is it really achieved under this system or not? So, basically one chapter in the book finds that there isn't much of equality of opportunity in university access even though the system is free. So, we're extending into this paper. We are looking at whether there is equality of opportunity in accessing different specializations or fields in university. And by equality of opportunity we follow the rumor definition where equality of opportunity means that an individual is rewarded based on his efforts not based on predetermined circumstances like social background for instance. So, now moving to data, sample and methodology we use in the paper. We use the survey of young people in Egypt in 2009. This is a nationally representative survey focusing on youth. It was conducted by the Population Council in cooperation with the research arm of the Egyptian cabinet back in 2009. For the purpose of the analysis we do in the paper our sample focuses on youth aged 20 to 29 that has ever attended university. And we use regression analysis in order to be able to isolate the different effects of social background. And explanatory variables include social background, include wealth, quintiles, parents, education, sex, location like urban rural residents, and also regional location as well as birth cohorts. Also in order to examine the effect or the equality of opportunity in accessing different university specializations we had to group the specializations we have in the survey. So basically we played around with this a bit but we ended up having four groups of specializations depending on the score needed to access these and also depending on our knowledge of which specializations are more prestigious in a way from the point of view of Egyptians. So we have the groups of religion law as the lowest and then there is arts education, there is commerce and the highest or top field is the medical school and engineering. And I will highlight here just the main results. So basically here this graph is showing the isolation of the effect of parental wealth on which specialization, which university specialization and individual joins. So if you look, if you focus on the medical school and engineering because it shows the inequality which is the purple bars, we have here four groups actually we have quintiles, they should be five but because too few people in the bottom two quintiles actually go to university we have to lump them together so that's why we have four groups. So you can see focusing on the purple bar that there is an increase in the likelihood of joining going to medical school and engineering with wealth. It's very obvious. So the result is basically the conditional on attending university and holding everything else constant comparing the top wealth quintiles. It's 1.5 times more likely than the fourth quintile to join medical or engineering schools and of course the difference is more stark if we compare it to people in the bottom two quintiles. So actually the ones in the top wealth quintile are four times as likely as those in the bottom two quintiles to go to medical or engineering. This effect is actually robust too if we take into account test scores so you can find that at almost every test score those individuals that come from the top parental wealth quintile are more likely to join medical and engineering. We also looked at combining the effect of social background so instead of looking at the effect of wealth and other social background dimensions so we defined two profiles one we called the most deprived which we defined as someone who comes from the lowest wealth groups who has illiterate parents who lives in the most deprived region of Egypt and in contrast to that we defined the most privileged individual who comes from the highest wealth quintile has university educated parents and lives in urban provinces in Egypt. And again this shows very stark differences in the probability of joining different specializations again focusing on the medical or medicine engineering which is these bars. Comparing people from different profiles we find that the purple one is for the most privileged male while the green one is for the deprived male so you can find that the male from the most deprived background has over 70% chances of going to medical school while the one from the most deprived one has chances like just about 5% so that even compounds the effect. So again summing up the most privileged male is 25 times more likely than the most deprived to attend medical school or engineering school groups and the most privileged female is 13 times more likely than the most deprived female to attend this type of school and there is a male advantages while comparing the most privileged male is better off than the most privileged female. So now moving to the conclusions and policy implications obviously there is strong inequality of opportunity in addressing the different fields particularly the better or top university fields and since the system in Egypt is free that means that a greater share of public resources actually goes to the rich at the expense of the poor. So the policy implication obviously is that we encourage policies that would allow public universities to charge tuition instead of having free education to everyone and having the rich benefit from this and at the same time provides targeting and subsidizing the most deserving youth that actually cannot pay for their tuition for example through scholarships and loans and this we conclude would improve both equity and efficiency of the higher education system in Egypt. Thank you.