For some students, the start of the school year is no longer associated with the smell of new notebooks or the excitement of returning to school. Instead, it begins with household calculations: reusing last year’s supplies, worrying about school fees and the cost of extra classes, and wondering what the future holds.
Through conversations with four students, this field report shows how economic inequality between families begins shaping children’s lives at school and gradually translates into differences in subject choices, the quality of education they receive, their ability to compete in the national university entrance exam and even their hopes of continuing their education. As one of them puts it: “School is just an extra expense.”
“This year, just like last year, I couldn’t buy the school supplies I wanted. I bought simpler notebooks and reused some of my things from last year.”
For Inaz, an eighth-grade student, the beginning of the school year is no longer simply about the excitement of a new bag and fresh notebooks. It now comes with calculations in which every purchase has to be justified.
“Honestly, maybe parents think we don’t understand what they’re going through, but I see how hard my mum and dad work for me and my brother.”
The experiences of Inaz and the three other students interviewed for this report, alongside existing research and statistics, reveal a picture of educational inequality in Iran — one that begins with school supplies and the quality of a child’s school and extends to access to better teachers, extracurricular classes, competition in the national university entrance exam and the possibility of entering university.
Inaz: From Cheaper Notebooks to Dreams of Engineering Abroad
Inaz attends a state school. She says her teachers are good, but believes private schools offer students far greater resources:
“Private schools take the best teachers for themselves, or very well-known and capable teachers who have retired and now teach there. They also have lots of extracurricular classes, and students are taught much more intensively.”
This year, she did not buy a new school uniform either.
“The school didn’t insist on a new uniform. They said we could wear last year’s.”
Inaz dreams of studying computer engineering — but not in Iran.
“I want to leave our city because there is no work here.”
Her mother has a bachelor’s degree and her father a master’s. According to Inaz, her parents repeatedly tell her and her brother that they need to study so they can eventually leave Iran:
“Because there is no future for us here. Otherwise, we’ll end up like people we know who have master’s degrees and are still unemployed.”
Her teachers, she says, also stress the importance of learning a practical skill alongside their studies:
“Hearing these things worries us, but at the same time it motivates us to study so that education might give us a way to leave the country.”
Inaz’s experience echoes some of the findings of a study titled The Monetisation of Education and the Reproduction of Educational Injustice. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 teachers in Tabriz, the research examines inequalities in access to quality education and the ways family poverty affects students’ educational opportunities.
Mani: Studying Experimental Sciences Because His Family and School Chose for Him
Mani is in his second year of high school and attends a selective school for gifted students. But he did not choose his own field of study:
“My family basically forced me to study experimental sciences because they say medicine is the only career with a future. I wasn’t interested in it at all, but because I did well at school, my school, my family and my counsellor all encouraged me to choose this track.”
In Iran’s secondary-school system, the experimental sciences track is the main route towards medicine and other health-related university programmes.
His father paid around 30 million tomans in school fees this year.
“The fees vary depending on your family’s income bracket,” Mani says.
And that does not cover all the costs. His family must also pay for extracurricular classes, contributions to the school, educational and recreational trips, university entrance-exam tests and transport.
Mani is studying with the aim of entering dentistry, but he is not optimistic about competing in Iran’s national university entrance exam:
“Competition for medicine is extremely intense. Unless you go to a good school, have good teachers and access to the recommended entrance-exam books, you can’t get in.”
He believes students at selective and private schools in Tehran have access to more resources and better teachers, while the situation is very different for students outside the capital, particularly in deprived provinces.
Yet the pressure at his own school is also intense:
“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t study at a gifted school, because once school starts we’re under many times more pressure and stress.”
According to figures cited by sources used in this report, fees at some private schools in Tehran, including extracurricular programmes, can exceed 200 million tomans for the new academic year. Uniforms, food, transport and school trips are charged separately.
Another study, A Critique of the Privatisation of School Education in Iran’s Educational System, argues that the expansion of educational privatisation has not improved the quality of state schools and may instead deepen social divisions and reproduce class inequality.
Sarina: Five Million Tomans to Enrol in a State School
Sarina is in seventh grade and attends a state school. But according to her, even enrolling in a public school required money:
“When my mum and I went to enrol me, they said we had to give them five million tomans as a ‘contribution to the school’ before they would register me. But my mum argued with them and paid three million. I was a little embarrassed because some of my friends were there.”
Sarina’s mother does embroidery work and her father is a driver. Her family paid 2.5 million tomans for her school uniform. Sarina says she kept her headscarf and school bag from last year.
She wants to become an actor and leave Iran, but her mother would prefer her to study medicine.
“My mum says I should study medicine because art has no value here. And I tell her, if it has no value, then I’ll leave Iran. They’re worried about my future. They say they don’t want me to end up like them.”
Her mother has suggested that she could study medicine and act on the side.
Sarina’s response is simple:
“But I hate blood.”
Research cited in this report suggests that a family’s financial resources can determine access to different schools, classes and educational services, producing unequal educational opportunities between students.
Karen: “What Good Is Studying to Me?”
Karen is in eighth grade and attends a state school. Unlike the other three students, however, he has largely lost faith in education as a path to a better future.
“I worked this summer. I don’t want to study… What matters now is having a job.”
His father is a baker and wants his son to continue studying. Karen sees things differently:
“Who even studies at school now? The teachers have given up too because we have no motivation. They tell us themselves to go and work. What good is studying to me? I’ll just end up unemployed anyway.”
Karen’s older sister has a bachelor’s degree and is unemployed — an experience that has shaped his view of education.
“If I learn a trade now and save some money, that’s better than ending up with nothing later and having to start from zero… If my sister had learnt hairdressing like one of her friends, or some other trade, she could be saving money by now.”
According to Karen, his school charged his family 2.5 million tomans for enrolment.
He then says something that perhaps reveals more about his view of education than many of the statistics on educational inequality:
“School is just an extra expense.”
Behind the Statistics: Who Gets to University?
The experiences of these four students cannot, on their own, provide a complete picture of Iran’s education system. But available data also point to stark inequalities in access to educational opportunities.
According to figures published in sources used for this report, students from the three lowest income deciles account for just 5.6 per cent of more than 500,000 students at Iran’s state universities. By contrast, the three highest income deciles — the eighth through tenth — account for 62 per cent.
A similar disparity appears in data on the national university entrance exam. Among students ranking in the top 3,000 in mathematics, 61.9 per cent reportedly come from the ninth and tenth income deciles, while students from the bottom two deciles account for less than two per cent.
Among the top 3,000 candidates in experimental sciences, around 50 per cent come from the two highest income deciles. In the humanities, the figure is 43.1 per cent.
Data published on the 2025 university entrance exam also show a strong concentration of students from SAMPAD — Iran’s selective gifted-school system — and private schools among the highest-ranking candidates.
Economic sociologist Ali-Asghar Saeidi has described the relationship between the university entrance exam and inequality this way:
“Rather than creating inequality on its own, the entrance exam can turn inequalities accumulated over years of schooling into unequal outcomes in university admissions.”
According to Saeidi, poverty can restrict a student’s educational opportunities long before they ever reach the entrance exam.
The costs associated with the beginning of the school year are among the most visible manifestations of this inequality. Data compiled for this report estimate that in September 2026, a typical set of school supplies for one student cost around 13 to 15 million tomans. This does not include school uniforms, shoes, books, transport, food or extracurricular classes.
Mohammadreza Faraji Tehrani, vice-president of the Tehran Chamber of Guilds, has also said that rising inflation has left some low-income families unable to afford good-quality school supplies for their children.
But the problem goes far beyond notebooks, school bags and uniforms.
Faraj Komijani, secretary-general of the Islamic Association of Iranian Teachers, has described the emergence over the past three decades of a “multi-tiered” education system in which access to capable teachers, smaller classes and extracurricular programmes has become increasingly tied to a family’s economic and social position.
“School Is Just an Extra Expense”
The four students in this report are not following the same path.
Inaz still sees education as a route towards a different future. Mani, despite having access to greater educational resources, is under intense pressure from competition and his family’s expectations. Sarina is caught between her own aspirations and her family’s idea of what constitutes a secure future. Karen has begun to question whether continuing his education is worth it at all.
What they share is the intrusion of economics into decisions that might otherwise appear educational or personal: which notebooks they can buy, which school they attend, which subject they choose, what resources they have to prepare for the university entrance exam, and even whether continuing their education is worth the cost.
The research cited in this report likewise suggests that the increasing monetisation of education and the unequal distribution of resources can widen the gap between students’ educational opportunities.
For Karen, however, this is neither an academic concept nor a figure in university entrance-exam statistics.
He sums it up in a single sentence:
“School is just an extra expense.”
A system that was supposed to function as an engine of social mobility has instead become a mechanism for reproducing class privilege. Families able to pay school fees of 200 million tomans and finance private classes can give their children a far greater chance of reaching state universities; the children of bakers, drivers and embroidery workers may instead drop out or emerge from university with bachelor’s degrees and no jobs.