Catherine Rampell: Trump is killing one of our strongest exports

President Donald Trump says he wants to reduce our trade deficit. Yet he’s destroying one of our winningest exports: higher education.

Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.

We also run a huge trade surplus in this sector, meaning that foreigners buy much more education from the United States than Americans buy from other countries. In the 2022-2023 school year, more than three times as many international students were enrolled in the United States as there were American students studying abroad. Translated to cash: Our education-services trade surplus is larger than the trade surplus in the entire completed civilian aircraft sector.

Why? Regardless of what Trumpland claims, America is really, really good at higher education.

Our K-12 schooling outcomes are mediocre when compared with peer countries, but our postsecondary institutions are the envy of the world. That’s particularly true for larger U.S. research institutions, which excel not only at passing on existing knowledge but also enlisting students in the production of new knowledge – such as the cutting-edge scientific research that powers careers, businesses and entire economies.

Our ability to attract international academic talent is a huge boon for other reasons not related to trade.

The international students we enroll are more likely to pay full freight. This means their tuition dollars cross-subsidize financial aid for lower- or middle-income American students. (Such as, say, Vice President JD Vance, who attended Yale University.) International students have also served as a powerful weapon in building American soft power: Those who train here learn not only our rigorous scientific procedures but also American values. They bring those values – respect for civil liberties, due process, democracy – back to their home countries.

Or they did, anyway. Trump either ignores all these virtues or writes them off as vices.

As with many politicians, Trump’s trade agenda fetishizes 1950s-style manufacturing rather than 21st century services, even though it is the latter that the United States excels at producing and selling abroad. (Think not only education, but also software, engineering, entertainment, financial services, etc.) We run a huge trade surplus in the services sector, which Trump perplexingly excludes when quantifying our trade balance.

More significantly, Trump and his underlings have deep contempt for universities, including (perhaps especially?) the ones they attended.

Among this administration’s first actions was to (illegally) cut off scientific grants to academic research institutions, including those working on cancer cures and HIV treatments. Courts have paused or temporarily reversed some of these measures, so Trump found other ways to continue his vendetta against colleges.

Under the guise of protecting Jews, Trump has frozen billions of dollars of federal funding at the University of Pennsylvania (Trump’s alma mater), Columbia, Harvard and other institutions. Not a single Jewish student has been made safer by these actions, which slashed funding for both research and financial aid.

This will be a huge financial blow even for the richest universities with large endowments, which are usually restricted by donor stipulations and legal obligations. Money donated to fund a computer science program, for example, can’t easily be reallocated to an Alzheimer’s study Trump just defunded.

Institutions of all means are scrambling to contain the damage. Some schools are slashing admissions or rescinding already-offered acceptances. This has become particularly common in hard-science graduate programs, which are expensive to run and rely heavily on grant funds. They also happen to be critical to U.S. economic growth.

But say schools somehow found a way to plug funding holes and resumed regular admissions of American and non-American students alike. What international student in their right mind would still come study here?

Masked immigration agents have snatched students off the streets on allegations of antisemitism and support for terrorism, even despite internal memos admitting that zero evidence for such accusations exists. Elsewhere around the country, at least 1,000 students have had their visas revoked, according to an Inside Higher Ed database.

Based on my own interviews with university officials, students often do not know why they are being told to self-deport or face detainment. Many participated in no Gaza protests or other political activities (not that this should matter). In at least three instances, visa terminations appear linked to traffic tickets.

As though that weren’t terrifying enough, some universities are actively collaborating with immigration enforcement to ferret out international students accused of wrongthink.

Last fall, Trump promised green cards to any international student bright enough to graduate from U.S. colleges. He also promised to help his country better compete on the global stage. Today, he’s destroying one of our most powerful economic engines – and ensuring international students don’t come here (let alone graduate) at all.