This commentary is by Justin Neuman, who is a professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School and a developer of philosophical software.
I’m in the export business. I teach literary studies to college students.
That’s not how professors usually describe themselves, but it should be. American colleges and universities sell one of the world’s most desirable goods or services: an American education.
Education is an unusual export because when someone buys it, the product stays here and the customer comes to us, rather than the other way around. When international students enroll in American universities, currency from international sources flows to an American institution. What’s more, much of what international students spend on housing, food and other services lands in American communities too.
No state should be paying closer attention to this than Vermont. In 2024-25, the most recent year for which we have full data, 1,279 international students attended Vermont colleges and universities. They contributed an estimated $57.6 million to the state economy and supported 336 jobs.
For scale, compare the value of international students to that of Vermont’s most famous export, maple syrup. The state’s entire 2025 yield was valued by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets at $101.7 million. Obviously, we’re not comparing apples to apples here, but the students-to-syrup comparison conveys the size of what’s at stake: The money international college students bring into Vermont is worth more than half of the state’s syrup business.
And that $57.6 million doesn’t count the value of Vermont’s secondary-school export market. Nowhere is this logic more apparent than at Vermont’s private boarding schools and ski academies, where hundreds of international students come from around the world to study and train. Families want their children inside the American educational pipeline as early as possible; those students go on to American colleges, have American careers and become American taxpayers.
Education is an export industry and a potential growth engine hiding in plain sight — and we’re losing customers. New international enrollment at American colleges fell 17% in fall 2025. NAFSA: Association of International Educators estimates that the decline cost the American economy $1.1 billion and nearly 23,000 jobs in a single fall, including an estimated $1.5 million loss in Vermont. During the critical May-to-August visa season in 2025, the United States issued 36% fewer F-1 student visas than during the same period the year before.
The verdict this fall is worse. NAFSA’s August numbers estimate that international enrollment could have declined another 9.5% in 2026, meaning as many as 111,000 fewer students, translating to $3.4 billion less economic activity and nearly 40,000 fewer American jobs. Vermont’s projected share of that loss is $4.6 million.
Vermont also knows, better than any state, what happens when a college dies. Burlington College closed in 2016. Green Mountain College, Southern Vermont College and the College of St. Joseph all shut their doors in 2019. Marlboro College followed in 2020, Goddard in 2024. Sterling College in Craftsbury graduated its final class in spring 2026 after more than 65 years. Green Mountain College was Poultney’s largest employer, with more than 150 faculty and staff; when it closed, people moved and property values fell.
In 2019, PBS reported that Vermont had more colleges and universities per capita than any other state in the country, with 22. Since then, seven Vermont colleges have closed, merged or reorganized.
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These aren’t elite schools; they’re tuition-driven institutions in small towns whose economies depend on a campus staying open. And Southern Vermont’s campus is moving toward resort redevelopment; the Marlboro campus is operated in the summers by Marlboro Music; Goddard has become an arts and community hub; the Green Mountain campus is proposed as a Christian university.
One of those names is personal for me. In 1994, I was a senior at a rural high school that didn’t offer AP courses, so I took four courses at Marlboro College instead, a few miles from our home, mostly on dirt roads. The professors there treated me like a scholar, and that year set the course of my life. I teach literature today because a tiny Vermont college had an open door and a seat at the table.
Instead of arguing about comprehensive immigration reform for another generation, let’s start with the easy case.
Call it the “full-tuition path.” If an international student is admitted legally to an accredited American college or university, pays full tuition and graduates in good standing, they should receive a green card at graduation. Especially undergraduates, who arrived at places like the University of Vermont or Middlebury College at 18 and spent four years in the dorms, classrooms and towns where assimilation actually happens.
They shouldn’t face a lottery, a bureaucratic obstacle course or a decade in a visa queue. If this sounds like a fast track to citizenship, it is. Naturalization usually requires five years as a permanent resident. I’d go further and count the years they spent studying here toward that requirement. And if this sounds like it favors those who can pay their own way rather than the needy and desperate, it does.
I’m arguing that if we’re going to admit immigrants by some criterion, “graduated from one of our own universities while paying their own way” is a pretty darn good one. I’m emphasizing that this issue is separate from border control. And it’s an intuition that has emerged on both sides of the aisle. Donald Trump himself made a version of this argument in 2024, while Hillary Clinton’s 2016 technology agenda proposed stapling green cards to accredited American master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.
Vermont needs these students in two ways. First as customers of institutions and communities already struggling with declining enrollment. Then we need them as young, educated residents in a state whose own fiscal analysts warn that its labor force will continue to shrink without substantial in-migration.
Rarely have Americans agreed on so much while doing so little. Congress should pass legislation opening a full-tuition path to qualified international students, and the president should sign it. Vermont’s colleges will welcome the students and the tuition; businesses across the state will welcome the customers; and eventually, fellow citizens will welcome their new neighbors.
