Commentary: America’s Best Trade Deal: Export Education, Import Founders. It’s Sadly Ending

American universities have been struggling over the past couple of years with three mounting crises – the long-anticipated demographic cliff, cuts to federal research funding, and growing doubts about the value of higher ed. Now, a fourth crisis is blowing up application portals. 

Last year, applications from international students declined modestly – a warning sign that most institutions shrugged off. New enrollments in the fall of 2025 told the real story: the number of new international students in U.S. universities declined by 17 percent. The impact was even greater in business schools, engineering schools, and other programs that attracted large numbers of international students.  

If last year’s Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) application trends survey was a brush fire, this year’s reality represents an inferno. Anecdotal stories from fellow deans indicate that some programs are seeing 50 to 70 percent drops in international applications for fall 2026. 

‘THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES ARE ENORMOUS’

To understand why, look one year back. In 2025, international students did everything they normally do to study in the U.S.: they took tests, applied, obtained admission, paid deposits, and made travel plans. Then, over the summer, just as they were about to come, the U.S. government paused new student visa interviews. Tens of thousands of admitted students could not even get appointments, much less visas, shattering their dreams just days before classes began. This year’s application collapse is, in part, the rational response of their friends: after watching classmates spend months in limbo, many simply decided, “I don’t want to go through that.”

The economic consequences are enormous. 

International students contributed $55 billion to the U.S. economy in 2024–25, and supported 378,000 jobs.   The impact flows well beyond northeastern “elite” universities.  Twenty-five percent of the 47,000 students at The University of North Texas last year were international students.  Twelve thousand residential  graduate students were enrolled at Georgia Tech in the fall, representing a majority of its in person graduate program.  The University of Central Missouri produces graduates in nursing, technology and manufacturing for the region near Kansas City. UCM saw a 62% decrease in graduate enrollment in the fall of 2025.  If you have aging parents, like I do, how grateful are you for their foreign-born nurses and caregivers?     

HOW TO ERASE TRADE DEFICITS? EXPAND INTERNATIONAL EUCATION

The stakes for our innovation economy are even greater. Forty percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science since 2000 were awarded to immigrants.  At least 59 of the top 100 unicorns have a foreign-board founder. Many of the leaders who built the American economy we enjoy today arrived on student or other visas, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Elon Musk, and Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research won the Nobel Prize and made COVID vaccines possible.  They didn’t take from America. They built it.  

If policymakers want to erase trade deficits, they should expand, not contract, international education. Each year, we “export” more than $50 billion in educational services, roughly comparable to our exports of autos. Texas alone generates an estimated $2 billion annual educational trade surplus. Missouri, prior to the dramatic decline in 2025, ran an 8.3-to-1 ratio of incoming international students to outgoing study-abroad students.

This seems like a pretty good trade for us:  America exports educational services and imports founders. 

For today’s potential applicants, the damage has been immediate and psychological. Young people’s social media feeds in India, Nigeria, and the Gulf states should be stuffed with glossy campus videos. Instead, algorithms fill their screens with clips of ICE detaining people that look like them. Layer on social media screening requirements, threats to revoke visas, and tough rhetoric, it is no surprise that students are telling each other, in group chats and on TikTok, that the United States feels more like a risk than an opportunity.

A SELF-INFLICTED CRISIS WITH LONG-LASTING CONSEQUENCE

Meanwhile, the demand for high-quality education has not disappeared; it has moved. Global graduate management applications grew 7 percent in 2025, but none of that growth is happening stateside. Domestic applications in India surged 25 percent, East and Southeast Asia jumped 42 percent, and European schools are reporting double-digit gains. Spain has launched a fast-track visa program to capture the students we are turning away. GMAC, in its report called “The Great Rerouting of Global Business Talent,” found that 40 percent of international candidates are now less likely to study in the United States, the highest figure ever recorded. 

This crisis is self-inflicted. Closing off these pathways will hurt U.S. competitiveness for decades.

America’s edge has never come from being the only country with great universities. It has come from being the country that ambitious young people around the world believed would welcome them, educate them, and give them a fair shot to contribute. My own institution, American University, has a rich history with international students; today, they are CEOs, investors, and physicians and teachers in the United States.  We want more international students, not fewer.

My grandparents fled antisemitism in Poland and landed, poor and uneducated, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, an unlikely landing spot for Eastern European Jews.  Each of their children went from Cheyenne Senior High School to college and build successful careers and families.  International students arrive with skills, ambition, and grit; they give far more to this country than they take. Turning them away is a choice. And unless we change course, it is a choice that will make America poorer, less innovative, and less influential in the world for years to come.

---

David Marchick serves as Dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business and is a retired senior partner at the Carlyle Group.

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.