Foreign-Student Enrollments at Risk as Trump Administration Targets China

Josh Mitchell and Melissa Korn:

China sends more students to the U.S. than any other nation, accounting for roughly one-third of the 1.1 million international students enrolled at American universities in the 2016-2017 academic year. China has long valued access to U.S. colleges and universities, which consistently rank among the best in the world.

When international students and their families spend money at American colleges, it is considered an export for the U.S. because money flows from a foreign country to the U.S.

Foreign students attending American educational institutions accounted for $39.4 billion in U.S. exports in 2016, Commerce Department data show. That figure mainly reflects the tuition students pay and excludes spending on many other goods and services, such as rent, clothing or food.

By contrast, Americans studying abroad bought $7.6 billion in education imports that year. That means the U.S. ran a trade surplus of nearly $32 billion in education, one of the largest of any industry. It is close to the U.S. civilian aircraft industry’s $43 billion surplus in trade last year.

The anti-China package is part of a broader push by President Donald Trump to reduce the nation’s overall trade deficit, which reached $568.4 billion in 2017. Some economists say the effort to crack down on China—along with a separate U.S. push to reduce immigration—could inadvertently hurt the U.S. where it has a comparative trade advantage.