Higher education in Asia is massifying at an exceptional pace and scale. In this paper, I ask how practices and discourses which inform the internationalization of Singapore's higher education can provide opportunities for developing cosmopolitan learning that it claims to provide. Cosmopolitan learning is closely related to cross-border student mobility and plays an important role in shaping the international students' identities, aspirations and worldviews. Based on a recent study in Singapore of a group of international students from various parts of Asia and Europe, this paper attempts to bring the theoretical and grounded realities of cosmopolitan learning in an Asian context into the fore. The aim of the paper is to provide a useful frame for rethinking the purpose of international education for cosmopolitan learning in an increasingly interconnected world that is strewn with ambivalence, and what that means in the context of Singapore as an erudite nation-state critical to building Asian education hub aspirations.