Claudia Wiens / Getty Images for NBC News

Ozal Kilic in Gezi Park, Istanbul, where several week long protests took place earlier this year. Kilic camped out there for 20 days. Now the municipality has improved the park, planted many flowers and built a playground for children.

This is part of a series – Future Shock: Millennials in Crisis – looking at how young people around the world are grappling with the transition to adulthood in a challenging global economy. 

ISTANBUL, Turkey – Young people in Turkey are more politicized following mass anti-government protests that rocked the country this summer. For many Turkish citizens in their late teens and early 20s, a long-standing belief that Islamist students have an upper hand in an important university entrance exam is provoking many to take to the streets.

Ozan Kilic, 19, scored high on the exam and will begin a prestigious state university this fall. Yet, he still took part in the protests, initially sparked by government plans to demolish Gezi Park, a lone green-space in central Istanbul, which grew into a manifestation of discontent with government policies.In Turkey, state-run colleges are preferred by many Turkish citizens because they are both free and considered more prestigious than private schools because of their established track records.

“If you consider the 10 best public universities, no private university can match their level,” Kilic said.

For young people such as Kilic, the controversy surrounding the exam is an example of how secular youth are being marginalized by Turkey’s Islamist government in favor of religious youth who will advance its agenda in the future.

The belief is widespread among secularists, who feel threatened by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which has roots in political Islam.

In recent years, the AK Party gained control over Turkey’s traditionally secular state and the role of religion has grown in the public sphere.

“They want to put their own people into every domain,” Kilic said.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the soldier statesman who founded modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, believed religion was holding Turks back and promoted a secularist policy. As a result Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country that is currently less conservative than its neighbors in the Middle East.

But many secularists fear that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also leads the AK Party, is reversing that trend.

“We want to raise a religious youth,” Erdogan said in a controversial speech to the Turkish parliament last year. “Do you expect the conservative democrat AK Party to raise an atheist generation? That might be your business, your mission, but not ours. We will raise a conservative and democratic generation embracing the nation’s values and principles,” Erdogan added.

When it comes to the exam, religious students are accused of receiving an algorithm or “cypher” that allows them to calculate the correct answers while at private preparatory schools, called dersanes.

Atilla Yesilada, a political analyst with Istanbul’s Global Source Partners, said that the controversy has existed for about six years.

“I would say there is enough circumstantial evidence to conduct a serious and impartial inquiry…” he said. “Until that takes place I think most of the students who [aren’t members of a religious movement] will feel discriminated and disadvantaged against.”

Hazal Deniz Tunc, 17, a high school student in Istanbul who is preparing to take the exam next spring, believes that Islamist students are gaining the upper hand over secular students.

“If you want to conquer a country you first have to plant the people who are close to you in the position of doctors, nurses, teachers,” she said, explaining why Islamist students are assisted in attending top colleges.

“This is what is happening in Turkey as well.”

Highlighting the importance of the exam in defining one’s future in Turkey, Tunc said that some of her friends even contemplated suicide instead of disappointing themselves and their family with a low score.

other times she thought: “Don’t be ridiculous. Look at your country. You should go and save yourself.”