Over the last sixty years, Egypt’s dual policies of free education and a guarantee of public sector employment for all university graduates have opened up opportunities for new economic roles for young women, opportunities which have been seized by middle class women in particular. Yet with the shrinking of the public sector since the 1980s, young Egyptians have increasingly looked to the private sector for employment despite the class and gender biases that persist in private sector hiring. In fact, since 1988, the decline of the public sector has been accompanied by declining rates of labor force participation among educated women. During this same period, women’s university attendance has continued to increase and the gender gap in enrollment has all but disappeared. Why then, are young women and their families continuing to invest in higher education when their employment prospects are so poor? I address this question through a set of 28 in-depth interviews conducted with middle class, female undergraduate students at public universities in Cairo. Specifically, I ask how these young women view their investment in a university degree in relation to their work and family expectations. I find that the students I interviewed, as youth of Egypt’s post-infitah middle class, looked to the multinational private sector as the source of meaningful work. Yet these young women’s commitment to the labor market over the long-term varied considerably, as did the degree to which they understood the difficulty of actually finding the types of jobs they wanted. All of them, however, regardless of their attachment to the idea of labor force participation, maintained the expectation of a future life grounded in the family. Their expectations for a marriage partner and their subsequent family life were in turn rooted in middle class Egyptian identity. Taken together, the students’ work and family aspirations were often vague and even conflicting, but both were based firmly on a social expectation of educational attainment. Using a Bourdieusian framework of education and class reproduction, I therefore argue that for these young women, the investment in higher education was not an investment in a particular work or family outcome, but rather in a middle class identity.