The legal fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump continues.
On Friday, a federal judge blocked the administration’s decision that would have barred Harvard from enrolling international students.
But even if Harvard wins, the way the Trump administration has been dealing with colleges and universities, and international students in particular, is already having an economic impact. One that is likely to last.
It’s important to remember that with all the talk in Washington about trade deficits, “We have a trade surplus on services,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
In fact, it was a $294 billion surplus in 2024, according to the commerce department.
”And a big chunk of that is the foreign students. This $56 billion that we get from foreign students coming here,” said Baker.
Money they spend on tuition and fees, housing and food.
“The best students from places like China, from Europe, from India, they want to come to Harvard. And it's not just Harvard, but they have enormous respect for U.S. universities in general,” said Baker.
But with students getting visas revoked, and potential enrollment bans like Harvard is facing, foreign students are starting to look elsewhere.
“We saw that just with the spring sort of enrollment and intake, there was a 13% decline in enrollment of graduate students in the United States,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, Association of International Educators. “And we know the spring semester has a smaller intake. The majority of intake for universities are in the fall.”
NAFSA’s research shows foreign college students and the money they spend while they are here translates into more than 300,000 jobs.
“That’s a lot of jobs supporting those students. From professors to just kind of the support industries for colleges and universities, and then the towns and cities in which those college and universities are,” said Madeline Zavodny, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida.
Zavodny looked into what would happen if the decline in foreign students continues.
“So if we just kind of froze where we were and didn't get new ones, we would lose about 2% of our undergraduate students and 11% of our graduate students over the next decade or so,” said Zavodny.
This would mean that trade surplus we have exporting education would shrink pretty drastically.
