Chapter 2 examines transitions in state education and employment in Egypt since the interwar era. Under Sadat, the state continued to underwrite the middle class, increasingly using oil-related resources to do so. The state greatly enlarged higher education, with a commensurate rise in the state employment of graduates. Both these developments were faster under Sadat than under Nasser. Despite the seeming demise of Nasser’s ‘state feminism’, the number of women in Egypt’s higher education system and state employment grew markedly. However, the quality of education and employment remunerations deteriorated as the middle class expanded. Constant public outcry against the deteriorating conditions of the educated and state-employed middle class usually missed this dialectic process--in which middle-class society simultaneously both expanded and partially lost its economic standing. This chapter further documents new venues for socio-economic mobility into the middle class via labor migration and/or employment in the informal economy. It argues that, regardless of the new economic opportunities provided by migration and the informal economy, higher education and state employment were coveted as guarantors of economic security and middle-class respectability.