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Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word: How Six Everyday Products Make the Case for Trade by Fred P. Hochberg
Published in January 2020
In 2018, the U.S. sold $42 billion of higher education services outside the United States.
Over 1.1 million international students are enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities. This number does not count the growing number of non-U.S. citizens who are enrolled in university-based nondegree and alternative credential online programs.
The tuitions that international students pay, 82 percent of whom pay full-freight, create an estimated 450,000 U.S. jobs.
The global impact of U.S. higher education goes far beyond these numbers. In ways both large and small, American influence on the worldwide stage has been created by boasting of the majority of the world’s top colleges and universities, and the draw that our schools have to the world’s postsecondary students.
Among the purchasers of a U.S. education are current and former heads of state of Japan, Israel, Colombia, Kenya, Singapore, Pakistan and South Korea. All told, nearly 300 current or former heads of government have studied at American universities. The numbers of business, cultural and political leaders who have studied at U.S. schools are incalculable.
If you think that U.S. exports of higher education are a good thing, and if you have been halfway paying attention to our current political climate, then it is likely that you are more than a little bit worried.
As you are no doubt aware, the trend line of international students studying in the U.S. has been heading in the wrong direction since the 2016 election.
The anti-trade sentiment that characterizes the current administration, as well as some of the Democratic candidates, is likely not directed at curtailing U.S. higher education exports. Trade wars, however, have unintended consequences. The ability of U.S. colleges and universities to attract international students to our campuses, or to enroll international students in online programs, may end up being a casualty of broader anti-trade policies.
If worries about the future of global education at your institution are enough to get you to consider reading Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word, then at least your anxieties will have some productive outlet. There is only one chapter in the book about higher education, from which I drew the numbers in the first few sentences of this book review. The rest of the chapters are about how trade policy works, the impact of tariffs and the economic and employment winners and losers of trade.
The author of Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word, Fred Hochberg, never seems to tire of telling his readers that he served as Obama’s chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States from 2009 to 2017. This writing tic can be annoying -- Fred, we get you had this big gig -- but there is no denying that Hochberg knows what he is talking about. As a nonacademic (he previously ran the family Lillian Vernon Corporation), Hochberg’s writing is free of equivocation and jargon. He explains how trade works in simple and direct language.
Nor is Trade Is Not a Four-Letter Word dogmatic about the benefits of trade. Hochberg is clear that trade creates winners and losers, and he believes that (following JFK) it is the role of the federal government to soften the blow for those displaced by trade agreements.
Many academics that I know do not put trade policy at the top of their policy concerns. They argue -- quite convincingly -- that issues such as health care and inequality are much more important to tackle.
The question that I think all of us in higher ed need to grapple with is how much we will rely on the global market to sustain our colleges and universities. For schools in the Northeast and the Midwest, I’m not sure where we are going to get our students from if we are unable to attract international applicants. There are too few babies being born in these areas, and too little in-migration, to result in anything but shrinking demand for traditional (residential) degree programs.
Beyond the economic boost that international students give our schools, the brilliance and excitement and diversity of perspectives that global learners (and faculty) bring to our campuses should not be underestimated.
Our higher ed ecosystem would be poorer -- in every sense of the word -- if the citizens of the world choose not to study (or are inhibited from doing so) at our universities.
What books on trade, and the place of U.S. institutions in the global higher ed market, would you recommend?
What are you reading?
