> something to strive for no?

No. If everyone strives to be a net exporter, you quickly end up with a race to the bottom.

> i think of countries export to import ratios like personal finance income vs expenditures. if you spend more than you make, where we you get the money to reinvest in yourself. you'll borrow it until you can't make the minimum payments and then default.

This is the wrong way to think about it. The trade deficit is nothing like personal finances/expenditures; this is a common meme in Germany, though, so I understand where you might have gotten the idea from. (Germany is presently dragging down the entire Eurozone with these beliefs.) You are not "borrowing" by having a trade deficit (nor do you have to borrow to have one.) It's just an outflow of currency, which is not particularly harmful to countries printing their own currency.

> There are many reasons why the US does not have free college (taxes too low, universities are run like business now, etc.) but running huge deficits and not having any savings to invest in society is one of the reasons.

This is not a reason at all. The trade deficit has nothing to do with US budget deficits, and the US still has plenty of money to invest back into society. It's a matter of political will and the way the government and education is organized. A lot has changed over the past decade for the worse and the better. Before the recession, there were actually enormous state subsidies to public universities that reduced their cost. During the recession, states began cutting back, which has been a contributor to rising college costs. At the same time, the government has modified the student loan program to be much better: indeed under the program as it now exists it's not really so much a loan as it is a tax on your post-college earnings. At the same time, universities are plagued with large, overpaid bureaucratic administrations, an increasing focus on new amenities, and perhaps even worse, a sense that the more money it costs to attend, the better the college must be. Students are in part rewarding colleges for raising prices - conservatives blame this on the ease of finding loans to pay for school, but I think the situation is more complex. If you had a dramatic restructuring of the US system, say, for example, you slashed public university administration budgets and froze spending on anything non-academic, instituted price controls, and consolidated all the various local, state, and federal programs to fund schools or scholarships, you could probably make college a lot cheaper or even free right now with minimal tax increases. The wealth and resources are already there. There was actually an Obama proposal to make community college free (a small step toward this), which the media estimated would cost 15 billion - chump change in the US budget.

As an aside, college costs are more complicated than people think. In many (most?) states, sufficient academic performance (as measured by an ACT or SAT score) automatically guarantees a full scholarship (or less, depending on your score.)

You also have community colleges, which are much cheaper and allow you to obtain a two year degree and transfer to a four-year university.

Once you get outside of private colleges and the big-name schools (usually on the coasts), public university costs are much reduced. And you can get in even if you're academically terrible, a situation you don't necessarily have in the European systems.

For example: I attended community college for free because of my ACT score. I could have gone directly to university for free, but I chose not to because of my age. I transferred to a four year school, paid for 3 (2.5 undergrad, .5 grad) years with money I earned at a minimum wage job, and then finished out grad school with an assistantship that paid my tuition plus a stipend. I graduated four years ago. This is still easily doable in most of the country. In fact it's still exactly doable if you just go directly to university and don't have to pay anything.