There are two prominent accounts of the 2011 Arab Uprisings and the role of education in
youth mobilization. The first argument focuses on grievances: this hypothesis rests on a link
between educational attainment and youth job aspirations that the labor market has not been
able to fulfill. These unfulfilled aspirations fuel grievances and, hence, protest. The other
argument focuses on mobilization costs. The central hypothesis is that education provides the
skills, knowledge and/or contacts that facilitate political participation. This paper assesses and
attempts to disentangle these two accounts by examining the effect of education on measures
of grievance, political knowledge, and political participation using rich youth surveys from
Egypt and Tunisia. In order to partially deal with the endogeneity of education, we control for
parental education and sibling fixed effects. We find a strong and robust correlation of
education with political knowledge and political participation, but not with grievances