Comparing undergraduate curriculum structure: knowledge boundaries in Chinese, American, and European elite universities

International higher education reform often assumes convergence around innovation, interdisciplinarity, and critical thinking. This study examines whether that shared language corresponds to convergence in undergraduate knowledge organisation. It compares six elite universities in China, the United States, and Germany using a multilingual corpus of course catalogues, degree handbooks, and syllabi. Stratified subsampling, semantic embeddings, network modularity, and retrieval-based coding assess compulsory structure, cognitive objectives, semantic topology, and emerging-topic visibility. The universities share an emphasis on applied and higher-order objectives but differ in compulsory structure and semantic organisation. The Chinese and German cases show stronger prescription and clustering than the U.S. cases, with variation within each pair. The findings link multilingual curriculum analysis to knowledge boundaries and suggest that curriculum reform should reflect existing knowledge architectures.