It’s a common complaint in local innovation circles: Boston and Massachusetts are hubs of higher education, but after we finish educating these promising students, they leave. If only more of them would stay, the city and state economies would benefit.

And I applaud the many efforts to convince more students to stay here and join our innovation economy, though I have had a hard time finding data on just what percentage do leave relative to other cities and states. (Help finding some would be welcomed.)

But the story of students flooding in to be educated then abandoning Massachusetts is overly gloomy and obscures a key fact: Education can function as an export.

There’s been a lot of productive debate at the national level lately about the nature of exports, including this post at The Economist by Ryan Avent that makes just this point:

American higher education is very much exposed to international competition. As Mr Cowen indicates, an American advanced degree is one of the country’s best exports (and your author opted to purchase from a foreign producer, the London School of Economics, when he went shopping for an advanced degree).

The main point I want to make is simply that the state benefits significantly from even the students who leave right after graduating. Massachusetts universities collect large sums in tuition from them, which in turn employs a significant number of people. Higher ed employs more than 100,000 people in the state, whose wages collectively add up to nearly $2 trillion per quarter, according to the state.

To some degree, the high quality of our higher education makes it even less likely that students will stay after they graduate. The better the product, the more students will come here even if they don’t care for Boston based on weather, proximity to home, or whatever else.

And, frankly, for Boston to retain a significantly higher percentage of students after they graduate would mean either bracing for population growth, or somehow expecting current residents to move away (or perhaps get priced out).

Should we still try and convince the best and brightest to stay and take part in Boston’s first class innovation ecosystem? Absolutely. But let’s not beat ourselves up over it either.

I hope folks will chime in in the comments to let me know what I may be missing. Because to me higher ed looks like a key export for Boston and Massachusetts. And that’s a good thing.