This school year, American colleges and universities saw a 17% decline in new international student enrollment. If you set aside the year of the pandemic, that’s the steepest decrease in over a decade. This reduction is making waves far beyond the halls of higher-ed. Based on my recent analysis, it represents a nearly $1 billion hit to the U.S. GDP – a hit that’s particularly concentrated in the Main Street sectors that form the backbone of many communities.
The employers taking the largest hit are in the restaurant industry (700 jobs), retail (350 jobs), and residential and commercial property rental (345 jobs), and auto repair (100 jobs). This is where the science of input-output analysis meets the art of economic impact analysis. We don’t know exactly which specific firms will be impacted. But from my experiences on campus across the country, these are exactly the types of main street college town businesses that exist near campus and serve students of all types.
