Cosmopolitanism, Inc.
The Modern Graduate as a Global Export Product
After resuming my studies at Aalto School of Business in the fall of 2023, I’ve been asked fairly often: “How was Harvard different from Aalto?” (By way of detour: during my break from Aalto, I studied creative writing at Harvard Extension and completed coursework at both Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School.)
The question assumes contrast, as if the answer must reveal a clash of worlds: Ivy Gothic grandeur against Nordic class, East Coast pedigree versus Finnish pragmatism. Of course, there are differences. Yet once past the façades, the resemblance is uncanny. These universities don’t exist in isolation; they belong to a sprawling family scattered across continents. Siblings and cousins trained into the same professional archetype, all recognizably shaped by the same household.
To live inside this household is like being one of the Kennedy boys in their prime—vying among yourselves, some stronger, some more favored, but to anyone on the outside, a cohort defined less by difference than by replication. Last month, The Crimson published a hilarious article about an “efficient week” for the model Harvard student: mornings in section, afternoons split between consulting-club comps, language tables, and interviews; evenings darting from mixers to mixers, weekends reserved for volunteering and résumé-ready side projects. Swap the masthead and it could run in Kylteri unchanged, save for the names and scenery: team assignments, case competitions, student-board duties, fireside chats, countless networking events. The point is to raise a bench of global players — like a political clan grooming sons for office, certain that if one falters, another will step forward, indistinguishable and ready to claim the role.
The sameness is not accidental. Universities that call themselves “global” operate inside a tight field where deviation is punished and convergence rewarded. Rankings, accreditation bodies, and recruiters form the invisible jury. Aalto and Harvard both court EQUIS or AACSB seals, both chase placements at McKinsey and BCG, both appear in the same FT or QS tables that translate reputation into percentages and indices. To play in that league, you must be legible. And legibility demands uniformity.
Organizational theorists call it isomorphism. Some pressures are coercive: accreditors require standardized “assurance-of-learning” metrics; recruiters expect graduates fluent in cases and frameworks; governments demand evidence of “impact” that fits international policy grids. Others are mimetic: when one school launches an “Impact Lab” or “Sustainability Accelerator”, the rest follow — not because the idea is revolutionary, but because not following looks provincial. Then, there are the normative channels: professors who trained in the same doctoral programs circulate globally, carrying the same canon with them.
This explains why, once you cross the gates, the details blur. Whether a student arrives through Finland’s demanding entrance exams or America’s “holistic” admissions rhetoric, the pressures align. The architecture may be Gothic in Cambridge and glass-and-plywood in Otaniemi, but the skeleton is identical: an institution optimized for comparability.
Back to the graduate archetype this machinery produces. World-society theorists call it the diffusion of rationalized myths — global scripts that institutions adopt to look modern, credible, and competitive. They’re portable formats: if a school in Espoo doesn’t resemble one in Boston, Singapore, or Paris, its degrees risk being illegible to employers, funders, and ranking compilers.
The sameness doesn’t stop at the business schools. Walk through any of these campuses and you start recognizing types — the design students, the engineers, the business crowd. Each discipline has its uniform, its cadence, its way of speaking. I’ve talked with fellow students returning from exchanges in Singapore, St. Gallen, Kyoto, Barcelona; their stories rhyme. The real cultural shock happens outside the university gates. Inside, it all runs alike.
Sociologists might trace it to occupational enculturation: once inside, your sense of self adjusts to the incentives of the field. Are we shaped by the field, or do we shape ourselves to fit it? Bourdieu called it the habitus — learned dispositions that make the engineered feel natural. Abbott described professions as “linked ecologies”, defining not only what you know but who you can be. In universities that serve as gateways to global firms, those ecologies begin early.
Surveys from the World Higher Education Database show that over 70 percent of top-ranked universities share nearly identical course structures in management; almost all list “innovation,” “leadership,” and “impact” among their learning goals. At Aalto and Harvard alike, you can major in international strategy, attend a sustainability program, and graduate speaking the same managerial dialect. A 2022 Times Higher Education report found that employers prize “adaptability” and “cross-cultural fluency” above depth. And so, institutions are manufacturing legible citizens of a global market.
But legibility has a shadow side. Once you can belong everywhere, you risk blending in nowhere. The sharper the specialization, the more standardized its expression. The arts student in Helsinki and the architect in Cambridge both talk about “human-centered design”. The coder in Tokyo and the data scientist in Lausanne both speak in “iterations” and “pipelines”. Fluency greases collaboration, but it erodes accent, texture, and local thought.
Maybe that’s the real paradox. Global education promises borderlessness but cultivates a kind of placeless expertise, graduates who can land anywhere and sound immediately at home, because home itself has been globalized into a professional vernacular.
It’s easy to call this conformity, but that misses the precision of the mechanism. It isn’t coercion, it’s cognitive autopilot. You begin to want what the structure rewards. Desire itself becomes optimized: a curriculum for the imagination. No one tells you to take a minor in accounting instead of astronomy, yet somehow astronomy never occurs to you as real. Philosophers like Bernard Stiegler saw this as the industrialization of desire, how systems externalize imagination until it loops back as preference.
When I took my detour to Harvard, it wasn’t some grand strategy. The creative-writing courses were what pulled me in; HBS and the Kennedy School followed almost by accident, extensions of curiosity more than ambition. Spending years on a separate creative writing degree used to scare me, as it didn’t align with my business studies or a clear career path. Only later I realized that detour was the most honest decision I’d made. The synergies were unexpected, but entirely my own.
So how different are Harvard and Aalto? Not much. But the students can be. Perhaps that’s enough — if we let ourselves remain intuitively authentic, complementing the institutional frameworks, whether of business, design, or technology, with something unmistakably our own. When each of us carries that distinct thread back into the shared structure, the pattern changes. It gains texture. Becomes less a dynasty of replicas and more a family of originals — bound by ambition, but balanced by soul.
