EDUCATION is no light-weight in the U.S. import picture. Revenues at degree-granting post-secondary institutions were US$649 billion in 2017, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

During the past 20 years, from across the globe, each year record numbers of students have come to the United States to attend one of the country’s 4,000 highly-regarded colleges or universities.

More significantly, international students typically pay full tuition and boost revenues for schools.

They also spend heavily on buying books, housing and other direct expenses besides tuition. International students — led by China — contributed more than US$30 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2014-2015 academic year, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the U.S. Commerce Department.

NAFSA, a Washington-based nonprofit group that supports international education, estimates that students from abroad created or sustained more than 455,000 jobs in the United States, almost nine times the number of American coal miners.

The value of education is almost double the revenue from America’s top agricultural export in 2017, which is US$21.6 billion from soybeans. When other indirect student spending is factored in — food, cars, clothes — education’s total export value, estimated to double the direct expenses, rivals that of pharmaceuticals and automobiles, which are US$51 billion and US$53 billion respectively.

(Xinhua)