Parenting & Family Quote by Renny Harlin

There is a quiet provocation in Harlin's line: he treats higher education not as an aspiration but as baseline childcare. Coming from a film director who built a career in Hollywood’s high-gloss, high-risk ecosystem, the remark reads like a cultural contrast shot. In the U.S., the “college question” is loaded with class anxiety, debt math, and identity branding. Harlin makes it sound like brushing your teeth.

The intent is partly explanatory and partly corrective. He’s not praising Finland as a utopia so much as pointing out how norms do the heavy lifting. When a university degree is “the first thing you expect,” the pressure shifts away from individual exceptionalism and toward collective infrastructure: affordable tuition, social trust, and an education system that doesn’t force families to gamble their futures on admissions roulette. The subtext is that ambition is easier to romanticize when the floor is high.

It also carries a sly rebuke to cultures where education is framed as either luxury or ideological battleground. Harlin’s phrasing implies that in Finland, the debate isn’t whether kids should go to university; it’s what they’ll do with the stability that assumption provides. There’s a filmmaker’s economy to it, too: one clean line that establishes setting, values, and stakes. Finland becomes a place where the coming-of-age plot starts after the degree, not before it.