A fair chance, on whose terms?

An examination paper leaks in India. A recruitment quota returns in Bangladesh. Students in France protest classrooms without enough teachers. Different grievances, but each raises a question that reaches beyond education: why follow the rules if the rules cannot offer a fair chance?

Families invest more than money in that promise. They reorganise their lives around it, accepting sacrifices because education appears to offer their children something better. When the route becomes unreliable, the loss is both material and moral. Years of effort suddenly seem to count for less than circumstances beyond one's control.

Bangladesh's 2024 protests began over reinstated quotas in government recruitment before developing into a much wider confrontation. The UN investigation identified deeper grievances involving governance and economic inequality. The recruitment dispute mattered because it concerned the distribution of scarce, desirable opportunities.

India's Cockroach Janta Party emerged from frustration over unemployment and examination leaks, turning educational grievances into public mobilisation. An examination is supposed to make selection defensible: prepare, compete, receive a result. A leak damages that justification. For candidates who have invested years in preparation, demanding accountability is a defence of the bargain they were asked to accept.

France exposes a failure further along the same chain. This autumn's school protests have centred on teacher shortages, overcrowding and deteriorating facilities. Students in disadvantaged Paris suburbs described facing examinations without adequate teaching. Even an impeccably administered examination cannot erase unequal preparation. Equal rules at the finishing line do not establish that the competition was fair.

Family wealth makes these failures easier to survive. It can buy tuition, fund another attempt or support a graduate through unpaid work. Thomas Piketty's research on inheritance's renewed importance in France helps locate such advantages within a larger pattern: accumulated wealth continues to shape life chances alongside earnings from work. When public provision falters, private resources can determine who gets another chance.

Youth is not a class, and these movements are not interchangeable proletarian revolutions. But apparently generational grievances can have a class dimension: the same institutional failure imposes different costs on those with financial protection and those without it.

Nor is "affective polarization" a sufficient explanation. The concept concerns hostility and distrust across partisan lines, as Shanto Iyengar and colleagues explain. Political loyalties may shape mobilisation, but they do not explain away its objects. A compromised examination or a missing teacher remains a concrete grievance. Reducing protest to partisan emotion risks overlooking what institutions actually need to repair.

Pakistan should examine that problem on its own terms. We do not need a domestic villain to identify a structural problem. We need to identify where effort meets avoidable barriers, who bears the cost, and who has the authority to remove them.

Unpaid corporate internships in Pakistan make this divide painfully visible. A graduate whose parents cover transport, meals and rent can accumulate experience; an equally capable graduate who must earn cannot afford the same opening. Employers may later reward the stronger CV, overlooking the family subsidy that helped build it. Privilege returns wearing the badge of merit.

Employers can replace unpaid entry routes with paid apprenticeships. Recruitment bodies can publish selection criteria and provide credible appeals. Governments can address gaps in teaching before asking examination results to carry the entire burden of merit.

These are practical obligations, not promises of equal outcomes. Celebrating exceptional young achievers cannot substitute for making ordinary advancement possible.

Young people can accept that success is uncertain. What they should not have to accept is that a fair chance depends on their family's ability to compensate for institutional failure. Confidence in merit begins where institutions take responsibility for making effort count.