The Best University Nobody Ranked
Forty years ago I chose the best university in the world to start my graduate education. A university that took my future more seriously than I did.
Prof. Bassem Khafagy 19 August 2026
Forty years ago this month, I stood in a small American town called Moscow, in the state of Idaho, and understood about half of what was being said around me. I had come from Egypt. My English worked well enough on paper and collapsed the moment anyone spoke at normal speed. I had almost no money. My bachelor’s degree came from a university at home so new that my class was among the first few it had ever produced.
I chose the University of Idaho for reasons that would embarrass a recruitment brochure. It was affordable. It was small. It was somewhere I could be bad at English for a while without it becoming a public humiliation. It turned out to be the best university in the world.
Not the best university. The best university for me. Those are two different sentences, and global higher education has spent thirty years quietly pretending they are the same one.
The first signs came long before anything that could be called an achievement. I arrived with no promise of financial support. None had been offered and none was owed. Then somebody noticed that I worked hard, and a teaching assistantship appeared. That single decision is the only reason I stayed above poverty in a country where I knew almost nobody, and it was made by people under no obligation to make it.
There was also a professor during my master’s who decided that my education included the country I was standing in. He took a personal interest not only in whether I was surviving as a student, but in whether I understood the culture I had walked into and the place that had taken me in. Nobody assigns that. It appears in no workload model anywhere. It happened anyway.
By the time I finished my master’s, a great deal of work had already been done on me by people who were not required to do any of it. That is the part I want stated plainly, because it came first and it mattered most.
About three years in, my advisor allowed me to write a research paper that had nothing to do with structural engineering, which was my field and my whole reason for being in that country. The paper was about what international students were doing to American engineering education.
Nothing in my record suggested I was qualified to write it. He read it anyway. Then he pulled the university in behind it, department by department, until it was ready. It went to the American Society of Civil Engineers and it came back first in the country.
That is not a research story. It is a story about a professor deciding that a foreign student with imperfect English was worth the trouble.
A university does not change your life by being excellent. It changes your life by being present
My Advisor Saw What I Could Not
The strangest of them came from my doctoral advisor, Prof. William Saul. Early in that work he told me to enroll in a public speaking course. Not a suggestion. He named the course and he named the instructor I was to take it with. I could not see what any of it had to do with my research, and I told him so. He did not argue. He simply kept returning to it until I went.
The instructor was brutal with me. She asked more of me than of anyone else in that room and she never explained why. Everything I handed in came back heavier than it had gone in. It remains the hardest course I have ever taken, in any subject, at any institution, and I finished it exhausted and a little resentful.
On the last day she stopped me and said she assumed I had been wondering why she treated me the way she did. I told her I had. She said it had come from my advisor. He had told her that this student might one day have a life in public speaking, that he might become something larger than a professor, and that she should start working on him now.
Sit with what that required. A man looked at a young engineer from Egypt who could barely follow a fast conversation, saw a capacity the young man could not see in himself, and then went and persuaded a colleague in another department to spend a whole semester building it.
None of it appeared in my dissertation. None of it moved a single number anywhere in that institution. The university gained nothing from it and was never going to.
I have spent the forty years since then speaking in public. Every one of those rooms traces back to a course I did not want to take, arranged by a man nobody asked to arrange it.
The greatest thing a teacher can do is take seriously a version of you that has not arrived yet
Rankings Answer a Question Nobody Asked
Every global ranking is built to answer one question honestly: which institutions perform best on the things that can be counted across borders. Citations. Reputation among academics who already know each other. Faculty to student ratios. Research income. That is a real question, and the answers have real value for governments, funders, and university leaders comparing systems. It is simply not the question a young person is asking.
The student’s question is smaller and far harder to measure. Can I pay for this without damaging my family. Will anyone here learn my name. Will I be allowed to be bad at something before I become good at it. Will one adult in this place take an interest in me that exceeds their job description.
No table on earth carries an instrument for that, and yet that is the whole question. A young person is not buying a research output. They are looking for somewhere they can be seen while they are still unfinished.
Ninety-Six Universities in a Hundred Vanish
There are roughly thirty-five thousand universities in the world. The most quoted global ranking published just over fifteen hundred of them this year. That is about four in every hundred.
Ninety-six out of a hundred are not ranked badly. They are not ranked at all. Most of the world’s students are sitting inside them right now. So when the phrase the best universities in the world is used, what is being described is one small room, and the building around it is not being described at all.
The instability makes the point sharper. The University of Idaho last appeared in one of the two best known global tables in its 2022 edition, and has not appeared in it since. On the other, it currently sits in a band somewhere between 1,201 and 1,400. Nothing happened to the town. Nothing happened to the professors. A university can slide hundreds of places, or fall off a list entirely, while remaining the same buildings with the same people doing the same work inside them.
We keep publishing lists of the best universities in the world without ever asking the only question that matters. Best for whom
Nobody Counts the Hours That Mattered
There is a resource in higher education that no ranking measures and every graduate remembers. Attention. Not teaching hours. Not contact time. Attention. The willingness of an adult who knows more than you to spend themselves on you when nothing in their own career depends on it.
That resource is often more available where prestige is lower. Not always, and there are generous scholars at the summit of every field. But a person at the top of a global discipline is rationing time against demand arriving from every continent. A professor in a small university in a small town has room to be curious about the young person standing in the doorway.
There is a word for what those people did, and I did not possess it when I arrived. Mentorship. I had genuinely never heard it used before Idaho. That is not because my part of the world lacks the thing.
Every civilization I know of has produced the figure who takes a young person under the arm and refuses to let them stay small, and every one of them has a name for that figure, worn smooth by centuries of use. What I had never met was a place where it was ordinary. Where it was not a rare gift from one exceptional individual, but simply how the adults in the building behaved.
That distinction is the whole argument. The thing is universal. The habit is not. Any culture can produce a great teacher. It takes an institution to produce a hundred of them and make the hundredth feel unremarkable. There is no column anywhere on any global table for how a place behaves toward the people inside it.
Attention is the rarest thing a university can give a student, and it is the only part still working forty years later
No Table Has a Column for This
None of this is an argument for abolishing rankings. They do real work. They let a ministry compare research systems. They let an institution see itself honestly against its peers. They give an international student a rough first map of an unfamiliar landscape.
The damage is somewhere else, and it is quiet. It lives in a sentence a seventeen year old says to a parent at a kitchen table. It is not a good university. What is actually meant is that it is not on a list. Those are not the same claim, and the distance between them has swallowed an extraordinary number of futures.
Somewhere right now a young person is being talked out of the place that would have changed everything, by a number that was never designed to be read that way. The question was never which university is the best. The question is which university will still be inside you at sixty.
Michigan State University gave me my doctorate, and I would defend the quality of that institution to anyone. By every measure the tables use, it is the higher ranked of the two. But if I am honest about where my life actually turned, it was a small university in a small town that one of the great global rankings stopped listing years ago and has not looked back.
Forty years later, I am still spending what I was given there. Not the structural engineering. The rest of it. The way of looking at the world. A room I can stand up in front of. The evidence that a person can take an interest in you without needing a reason.
The University of Idaho was never the best university in the world. It was the best university in the world for me. If you have found your version of that place, you already know that no list is ever going to confirm it.
Stop waiting for the list.
One more thing, and then I am finished: I do not know a single person at the University of Idaho today. Forty years have passed and every door I walked through there has changed hands more than once. I would still like this to reach them. If anyone reading this knows how to get this article to the University of Idaho, please send it. I am forty years late!
Prof. Bassem Khafagy 19 August 2026
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Prof. Bassem Khafagy: An academic leader, best-seller author, award winning researcher, and strategic thinker whose work spans the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently dedicating his time to rethinking the “University” as a transformative force in society. Prof. Khafagy is the founding force behind several global academic initiatives, most notably the World Universities Foundation, WUF, World Summit on Universities, WSU, Antalya Global Foundation, AGF, and the Re-Imagine University Newsletter & book series.
The visual compositions throughout this newsletter and the series are original copyrighted works by Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy. They are crafted using advanced technological tools, including artificial intelligence, guided entirely by the writer’s artistic vision and design sensibility. In a series about being you, it felt only right that the art itself reflects that spirit of creative possibility. © All rights reserved, 2026.