Should We Impose Trade Tariffs In Higher Ed? Lessons From U.S. Policy & European Football

International students are often celebrated as symbols of global exchange, but they are also a multibillion-dollar industry. In 2022–23, they contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy and supported nearly 378,000 American jobs, according to the Association of American Universities. In the UK, the 2021–22 cohort generated £37.4 billion in net benefit. For elite business schools, these students are especially vital: many MBA programs now rely on them for a third or more of their class and charge tuition that often exceeds $100,000 per year. The same dynamic is evident in France, where international students represented 23% of the total student population in 2025, according to Campus France, underscoring how central they have become to business education worldwide.

Each year, elite universities in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United States, and other wealthy nations welcome tens of thousands of international students, many from the Global South countries. They bring diversity, academic excellence, and billions in tuition revenue at a time when public funding is shrinking. For host institutions, it is an undeniable gain. For the countries sending their best and brightest, however, the story is more complicated. Host nations attract and often retain this talent for their own growth, while developing countries experience a steady brain drain with lasting consequences.

TALENT AS GLOBAL TRADE

What we are witnessing is a form of international trade, not in goods or services, but in talent. Unlike conventional trade, where mechanisms exist to protect domestic industries, global higher education operates without safeguards for the countries supplying the “raw material”: human capital.

In traditional trade, tariffs are tools to protect local industries. The U.S., for example, has imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, and semiconductors to sustain domestic production capacity. These measures help rebalance flows and preserve long-term economic strength.

In higher education, the imbalance is even sharper. Countries such as India, Nigeria, Kenya, and Brazil invest heavily, often under tight constraints, in developing young talent. Years of public schooling, national exams, and national or subsidized universities represent enormous investment. Yet as students reach their peak, they leave. Destination universities capture their tuition dollars. Host economies capture their labor and long-term contributions. Meanwhile, the sending countries lose potential doctors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

This movement of talent has grown exponentially in recent decades, despite tightening visa regimes. The pattern is clear: the developing world educates young talent, while the developed world reaps the benefits. For the Global South, the Return on Talent (RoT) is effectively zero. Generally developing and emerging economies invest in this talent education, and industrialized economies capture de lasting value. 

This is not an argument against global mobility. It is a call for mechanisms that reinvest in the systems where the pipeline begins.

TWO MODELS FOR EDUCATIONAL TARIFFS

1. Individual Contributions
   • International students who remain employed in host countries on temporary work permits could continue to pay income taxes to their country of origin.
   • If they later gain citizenship abroad, they could pay an exit tax covering the cost of their publicly funded education.
   • Dual citizens might maintain ongoing tax obligations to their country of origin, similar to professional football’s sell-on clauses, ensuring that the original “club” receives a share when talent succeeds abroad.

2. Institutional Contributions

1. • Elite universities that enroll students from lower-income countries could pay a proportional fee into a Global Education Reinvestment Fund.
   • The fund would support education infrastructure, teacher training, scholarships, and research in the countries of origin.
   • Crucially, this fee would not fall on students. It would be borne by the institutions that benefit most.

LESSONS FROM EUROPEAN FOOTBALL

Football offers a powerful analogy. Under UEFA’s solidarity mechanism, when a young player trained at a smaller club is later transferred to a major club, up to 5% of the transfer fee is redistributed to the original clubs that trained the player between the ages of 12 and 23. This ensures that the grassroots institutions that identified and nurtured raw talent are not cut out once the player achieves stardom.

The system has two key benefits. First, it provides ongoing revenue for youth academies and local clubs, sustaining the very pipeline that produces the next generation of players. Second, it reduces the risk of widening inequality in the sport by ensuring that money does not just concentrate at the top. In effect, it reinvests value back into the ecosystem where it began.

Why should higher education be any different? When a student from Ghana studies at a top-tier university and later joins a consulting firm or launches a startup in London or New York, enormous long-term value is being created. Just as in football, the institutions and countries that invested in that student’s early growth deserve to share in the returns.

An educational tariff or reinvestment mechanism could operate in a similar way: a small portion of the value generated by international graduates could flow back to the educational systems of their home countries. The principle is not punitive. It is about sustainability and fairness. Without reinvestment, the talent pipeline in many developing nations will continue to weaken, making the global higher education system more extractive and less equitable.

And just as European clubs accepted solidarity payments as necessary for the survival of the sport, elite universities could view modest reinvestment not as a burden but as an investment in their own long-term sustainability. The short-term “pain” of contributing, whether through tuition premiums or endowment allocations, would yield long-term “gain” in the form of stronger talent pipelines, enhanced moral credibility, and broader global access to future students.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE FLOW

In 2022, more than one-third of the world’s 6.9 million international students came from just ten countries.

• China: 1,052,000
• India: 622,000
• Uzbekistan: 150,000
• Vietnam: 134,000
• Germany: 126,000
• U.S.: 115,000
• France: 114,000
• Nigeria: 112,000
• Syria: 105,000
• Nepal: 95,000

The majority of this flow comes from developing/emerging countries. And the financial stakes are enormous. According to the Association of American Universities (AAU), in 2022–23, international students contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy, supporting nearly 378,000 American jobs. In the U.K., the 2021–22 cohort of international students generated a £37.4 billion net benefit. For host institutions, these students are not just academic assets, they are economic lifelines.

Meanwhile, the countries that invested in these students’ early education receive none of this return. Scholarship schemes such as the UK’s Chevening illustrate the imbalance: countless students stay abroad after their studies, while their home countries see no reinvestment.

TOWARD A MORE EQUITABLE GLOBAL SYSTEM

An educational tariff or talent reinvestment mechanism would help rebalance the global higher education economy. It would also ease the ethical tension universities face when they market themselves as “global” while extracting talent disproportionately from low-income countries. These institutions do attract talented students from across the world, though not yet in a fully global or fair way. At the same time, they are training future professionals and leaders who can play important roles on the global stage, which makes questions of fairness and reinvestment all the more pressing.

Institutions that participate could be recognized through a Global Equity Index, rewarding those that not only attract global talent but also reinvest in its origins.

Today’s global education marketplace is highly asymmetrical. Wealthy countries import and retain human capital, deepening divides. Poorer countries export it and lose it forever, weakening their innovation ecosystems. For the Global South, human capital is its most vital export.

Mobility must be preserved. But reciprocity must be built in. A tariff-inspired approach would not restrict the flow of students. It would support the rebuilding of systems that make such mobility possible in the first place.

THE REAL QUESTION

The issue is not whether international education functions like global trade, it clearly does. The question is whether we are prepared to treat it with the same level of responsibility.

If talent is a global asset, then global institutions must be accountable stewards of its equitable development. The “human factor” of the future is priceless, and it must not remain a one-way trade.

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Sanjay Padode is Chairman of the Centre for Developmental Education, a Board Member of Jagdish Sheth School of Management, and Founding President Vijaybhoomi University. Thami Ghorfi is President of ESCA School of Management in Casablanca, Morocco, where he teaches communication strategy and change management. Sherif Kamel is a professor of management at the Heikal Department of Management and the dean of the Onsi Sawiris School of Business at The American University in Cairo. Benjamin Stevenin is special adviser to Poets&Quants and former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education.

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