The administration is taking actions that would charge international students $100,000 for their stay in the United States after graduating from American colleges, The Wall Street Journal reported. Such a move would make it exponentially more expensive for foreign students to keep working in the US as young as undergraduate level while also potentially killing one of the most important and influential routes for international students to be brought into the US industry.
The fee would primarily focus on the key Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which is a key mechanism for international students of F-1 visas to secure work and have a lot of hands-on experience in the field they have left behind once they graduate. The administration has been heavily reviewing and targeting the OPT program for years and calling it a “systematic misuse, visa fraud,” and longer overstays. This fee is one aspect of a much more aggressive push by the administration to curb and control legal immigration. At the beginning of the month, officials adopted tough guidelines to limit the length of stay for foreign students in the country and international journalists, and it was changed to a maximum of four years for admissions rather than open-ended.
In addition to individual students, this $100,000 financial barrier is going to send shock waves through American higher education institutions and the top corporate employers, particularly in high-stakes sectors like technology, engineering, and finance that rely heavily on international graduates to fill critical, specialized roles. Between 2023 and 2024, the USA hosted more than 1.1 million international students who contributed tens of billions of dollars to the domestic economy through tuition, housing, and consumer spending.
This latest immigration move is reminiscent of the administration’s earlier attempts to limit international pipelines - such as a $100,000 fee for H-1B specialty occupation visas that are widely used by American companies to attract skilled foreign professionals - for which the administration has challenged this legal decision in higher courts. And if universities, corporate leaders, and advocacy groups are watching the situation, such a high fee can have a huge impact on America’s standing as a top global academic and professional destination for top global talent.
