Between the French and British occupations, Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-48) and his successors ruled Egypt as an autonomous Ottoman province. In order to establish and maintain that autonomy from Ottoman and European imperial interests, Muhammad Ali sought European expertise to aid in the rapid modernization of the country - reorganizing the military, reforming the civil service, and establishing a state-of-the-art vocational education system. This paper focuses on a foundational component of the Pasha’s educational reforms – the Egyptian student missions to France – in order to assess the impact of this first attempt to incorporate Western modes of knowledge production. These reforms represent an early effort to establish a system of higher education that diverged from religious models in the Middle East. The program of sending Egyptian men to study in Europe explicitly aimed to create a cadre of indigenous experts in particular kinds of European knowledge deemed useful and necessary in their capacity to engender modernization. Beginning in 1826, 250 Ottoman-Egyptian men were sent in six official student missions to Paris to acquire expertise in subjects hand-picked by the Pasha’s administration like military science, weapons building, medicine, printing, engineering, textile-making, administration, agriculture, diplomacy, architecture, and translation. This paper details the first and last student missions to Paris during Muhammad Ali’s reign while providing an overview of all of the missions. It argues that the day-to-day dealings of the students, instructors, and administrators of the missions showcase a contentious negotiation through which the idea of what was “useful” knowledge was continually reinvented. It will examine the careers of those students who worked in the educational system upon their return to Egypt, and explore how they mediated, justified, and indigenized what they learned in effecting modernizing reforms. In revisiting this early iteration of a transnational educational program, this paper analyzes primary sources including personal accounts of students such as the celebrated educational reformers Rifa‘a Al-Tahtawi and Ali Mubarak Pasha, published archival collections, a variety of diplomatic and bureaucratic memos housed at the Dar al-Watha‘iq al-Qawmiyya, as well as Ottoman employment files located at the Dar al- Mahfuzat. It is a part of a larger project focusing on the foundational institutions of Muhammad Ali’s education system to trace the nature of negotiations between French and Egyptian scholars, and elucidate what Egyptians understood as “modern” in the nineteenth century.