Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Of his many obsessions, President Donald Trump’s concern with the U.S. trade deficit is one of his longest standing. The so-called reciprocal tariffs that he recently announced and then paused were set not based on the tariffs those countries impose on American exports but on the balance of trade with each country.
What he wants, and presumably what will be necessary for the temporary tariff pause to become permanent, is for other countries to buy more from the United States. One would think that this concern would cause the president to be laser-focused on increasing American exports that countries around the globe badly want and have demonstrated they are willing to buy. Yet his administration is going out of its way to discourage other countries from purchasing one of our most successful exports.
The United States exports more than $44 billion per year in education and accompanying services. This is more revenue than any other category of services: more than travel services, more than business services, more than financial services, and many multiples of computer, health, and legal services. In fact, education raises more revenue from foreign countries than all but a handful of categories of American goods and commodities, only slightly less than pharmaceuticals and far more than iron and steel, plastics, furniture, dairy products, and even soybeans.
Related From Slate The Supreme Court’s Late-Night Rebuke to Trump Is Extraordinary in More Ways Than One Read More Most people, and perhaps the president, don’t think of education as an “export,” because we don’t ship it abroad like corn or transmit it digitally like computer software. Instead, foreigners come to the United States to purchase education from us and then take it home with them. They do this primarily by attending American universities, which are the envy of the world, and paying tuition in cold, hard cash.
Well over 1 million foreigners purchase U.S.-produced education this way each year, according to the Institute of International Education. In addition to paying tuition, they pay American businesses for food, shelter, transportation, and entertainment while they are here, supporting 400,000 American jobs and creating a double “win” for the balance of trade. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Over the past two months, however, the Trump administration has provided a master class in how to destroy demand for this crown jewel of our export economy.
First, it is intentionally trying to destroy the product, generally slashing billions of dollars of grant funding to leading research universities and specifically targeting those, most recently Harvard, that refuse to change their internal governance. The cutting-edge research they conduct and the academic freedom they enjoy is what makes American universities institutions that attract foreign students. Second, the administration seems committed to making foreign students believe they cannot safely purchase education from the United States by canceling student visas arbitrarily and detaining and deporting noncitizens who have not committed any crimes for exercising the freedom of speech that is the foundational promise of this country.
When ICE agents wearing face masks abducted a Turkish student attending Tufts University on a Massachusetts street in broad daylight and whisked her off to a Louisiana detention facility for co-authoring an editorial in the school newspaper, they might as well have told the entire world to not buy American. There are excellent universities in other countries too. If you were a parent, would you pay to send your child here to study?
Advertisement Third, the administration might be making it difficult for potential students to purchase their education here even if they are not scared away by the administration’s hostility toward them. Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered that student visa applicants have their social media accounts reviewed and, in some cases, undergo “enhanced screening.” Coupled with wholesale firing of tens of thousands of government employees, including deep cuts in State Department staff announced this week, these directives call into question whether foreign students who still want to come to the United States to study this fall will be approved in time to do so. No one really knows.
This uncertainty is just as debilitating for students without any “hostile attitudes” toward American institutions and policies that the administration wants to ferret out as for students who have such attitudes. Advertisement The Trump administration believes we are doing foreign students a huge favor by allowing them to study in the United States. Secretary Rubio calls them “guests” and says a student visa is a “privilege.” The truth is that foreign students are customers.
They benefit the United States and help our trade balance by purchasing our products. As everyone in business knows, if you want to have any customers, you need to provide them with a quality product and treat them with respect. A president who professes to be a master businessman ought to understand this.
Until he does, his crusade against American higher education will continue to undermine his economic goals.
