Students, including graduate students training in research, from around the world have flocked to the United States because U.S. higher education has been the global gold standard since World War II. In the 2023-2024 academic year, 1.1 million international students contributed $44B to the US economy, while just over a quarter of that number of US students left the country to study, contributing far less to the economies of the rest of the world. The U.S. higher education sector enjoys a very favorable trade balance.
Under President Donald Trump’s usual policy logic, he would be thrilled by this: There’s far more money coming into the U.S. for higher education than is leaving. Instead, higher education is a target because the president believes universities are a locus of what the political right calls wokeism, of antisemitism, and of threats to national security – all of it subsidized by the American taxpayer via the nonprofit status of universities and government support to university research.
While the president’s case against “elite” universities has some merit, the trajectory set by the current administration will destroy the strengths of universities and do little to address their weaknesses. I am especially worried about two large negative consequences.
First, the financial costs to the U.S. will far exceed the immediate reversal of the favorable trade balance in higher education. In the long term, the decrease in brain gain and increase in brain drain will dramatically diminish U.S. innovation and economic productivity. In the past, many foreign students stayed in the U.S., transforming ideas and innovations from their studies into businesses.
A 2022 report revealed that the founders of 25% of U.S. billion dollar startup companies came to the U.S. as foreign students. Furthermore, almost 80% of these companies have either an immigrant as founder or in a C-suite role. These include Elon Musk, whose companies have been the beneficiaries of numerous government subsidies and contracts, and who has, paradoxically, served as the driver of Trump’s cuts in R&D. A 2024 report from George Mason University found that 35% of U.S.-based Nobel Prize winners were foreign-born and almost half of them had earned their highest degree in the U.S.
The Trump administration is shutting that valuable tap of brain gain, while the draconian cuts in government support for research is opening the tap of brain drain. An accelerating number of both native and foreign born U.S.-based researchers are being lured abroad by large investments by other countries in university-based R&D. For the U.S., this double whammy will decrease economic dynamism and the global centrality of its economy.
Second, a staggering self-inflicted loss of soft power will result if international students are barred from the U.S. and if Fulbright and other scholarly exchanges are diminished. I recently experienced this firsthand when I was the only U.S.-based participant in this year’s Africa Week meeting at the University of Pretoria’s Future Africa, a pan-African platform to build capacity for research at African universities.
My presentation came two weeks after a group of white South Africans became the only refugees welcomed with fanfare to the U.S. since Trump took office and five days after Trump humiliated South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. Hence, I’ve never been more heartbroken or challenged to interpret the policies and leadership style of a U.S. president to a foreign audience.
South African political scientist Adam Habib’s keynote address made it clear that the injury to the reputation of the U.S. – as a trustworthy geopolitical ally, reliable source of lifesaving treatment for AIDS, and beacon of higher education and research collaboration – was extreme. If reversible at all, it will take a generation or more of restored steadiness in U.S. foreign policy. By turning its back on Africa, and simultaneously ceding technological and scientific leadership through draconian reductions in domestic research funding, the Trump administration is giving up the soft power of the United States.
Other countries have been quick to fill the vacuum. A session at the Africa Week conference was titled “Universities should lead the way for Africa to look East.” There’s nothing subtle about the subtext of that title: The U.S. doesn’t value partnership anymore, but Middle Eastern and Far Eastern countries, including Japan, South Korea, Singapore and, of course, China, do. Recent U.S. actions will accelerate the existing gravitational pull of China for African students.
Those countries to the East recognize what the Trump administration does not: that in the next 30 years, many important aspects of global demography, economy, political stability, and climate change will be determined by Africa. The share of global human population that is African will rise from about 18% today to about 40% by 2100, and most of the fastest growing economies are in Africa.
Cornell University has faculty, students and staff from 131 countries. My conversations with Cornell faculty colleagues from Africa and many other places have enriched my understanding of the way history has shaped our current global geopolitical landscape. I hate to imagine a depauperate future for U.S. higher education and economic innovation if foreign-born scholars are not part of it.