Opinion: A $70,000 fee is the wrong way to fix the student-visa pipeline

The Department of Homeland Security published a rule Thursday that would charge American universities $70,000 every time they sign off on a foreign graduate's first work permit, and $30,000 for every renewal after that. The stated purpose is fighting fraud. The practical effect, if the rule survives the comment period and the lawsuits that are almost certain to follow, would be to price most schools out of a program that has quietly become one of the main ways the United States keeps the foreign scientists and engineers it trains rather than exporting them to competitors. Congress has never voted to put a six-figure price tag on that choice. An agency is about to do it by rule.

What DHS actually proposed

The rule, published in the Federal Register as "Optional Practical Training Fees", would require schools certified under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program to pay $70,000 before recommending a foreign student for an initial period of Optional Practical Training, and $30,000 for each subsequent authorization, including the STEM extension that lets science and engineering graduates stay and work for up to three years. The fee falls on the institution, not directly on the student, though several schools would likely try to pass some of the cost along. DHS frames this as an integrity measure, saying the fees are meant to combat fraud and abuse, strengthen the immigration system and protect American workers. The agency is accepting public comments, and the official docket shows that window stays open until December 7.

OPT itself is not new or obscure. It is the mechanism that lets international students work in their field for a year after graduation, or up to three years in STEM fields, without a separate work visa. It is also, by now, large. The Institute of International Education's Open Doors report counted 1,177,766 international students at U.S. colleges and universities in the 2024–25 academic year, and found that the number remaining on OPT grew 21% to 294,253 — itself a sign of how central the program has become to how international education functions in this country. STEM OPT specifically grew even faster: roughly 95,000 students obtained STEM work authorization in 2024 alone, a 54% jump from the year before, driven in large part by demand in exactly the technical fields — engineering, computer science, data analytics — that the administration says it wants to protect for American workers.

A fee, not a fraud fix

There is a real fraud problem DHS could be addressing. Diploma mills and unaccredited schools that exist mainly to generate OPT eligibility are a known issue, and oversight gaps are worth closing. But a flat $70,000 toll charged uniformly to every certified school, including research universities with decades of compliance history, is not a fraud-detection tool. It is a price. As one immigration attorney, Steven Brown, put it in comments reported this week, there are not many schools that will want to pay $70,000 for a single student to get OPT — which is the point. Inside Higher Ed reported that education groups, including NAFSA and the Association of American Universities, noted OPT has historically been available whenever work is directly related to a student's field of study, with no suggestion that the broad eligibility itself is the source of abuse DHS describes.

"Driving away international talent would hurt U.S. innovation and economic growth," Fanta Aw, NAFSA's executive director and CEO, said of the proposal, arguing that OPT gives international graduates hands-on experience and fills labor shortages in high-demand STEM fields.

Who actually absorbs this

Set aside the students for a moment, though they are the most exposed: many would simply lose access to the practical training that, for a large share of them, is the only realistic path to staying in the country long enough to be sponsored for an H-1B visa later. The fee also lands on university finances that increasingly depend on international enrollment, particularly in STEM graduate programs where domestic enrollment alone often cannot fill labs or classrooms. It lands on the employers — hospitals, engineering firms, research labs, and yes, technology companies racing to staff an AI-driven hiring boom — that have built hiring pipelines around OPT because it lets them evaluate talent before committing to the far more expensive and restrictive H-1B process. And it lands, less visibly, on the broader case the United States has long made to the rest of the world: that its universities are where the most talented students should come to train, and that having trained there, they are welcome to stay and build things.

What the administration would say in response

The administration's defenders will make a coherent argument: OPT operates with less statutory grounding than most people realize, having been built through decades of regulation rather than a specific act of Congress, and an administration that believes it has grown too large or been used too loosely is entitled to rein it in. It is also true that an immigration system funded substantially by its own fees is not an unreasonable goal in principle, and that the administration has floated versions of this idea for months: reports as early as July described DHS weighing a $100,000 figure, and registrar and admissions officers' groups had been bracing for a version of this rule since the summer, so this is not a sudden ambush. Supporters will add that nothing in the rule bars a single student from working; it simply asks institutions to decide whether sponsoring that work is worth the cost, which is one way to describe rationing by price.

That is exactly the problem. Rationing a benefit that currently serves hundreds of thousands of students by making it unaffordable for all but the wealthiest institutions is a policy choice with enormous consequences for American competitiveness in science and technology, and it is being made through a fee schedule rather than through the kind of open legislative debate that a choice of this size deserves. If the goal is genuinely to root out fraud, a fee scaled to risk, audits of specific bad actors, or tighter school certification would do that without touching every legitimate student and university in the country. If the goal is actually to shrink the number of foreign graduates who stay and work here, that is a defensible position for elected officials to debate and vote on — not one an agency should impose by setting a price few can pay.

What comes next

The comment period runs until December 7, and given the dollar amounts involved, expect it to draw heavily from universities, business groups and immigration advocates on one side and restrictionist organizations on the other. Litigation is close to a certainty if the rule is finalized in anything like its current form; OPT has survived a prior legal challenge at the Supreme Court, and schools with the most to lose have shown they are willing to sue. Congress, for its part, has the authority to settle this question definitively, by legislating either the scope of OPT or a reasonable fee structure, rather than leaving it to whichever administration currently controls DHS rulemaking. Until that happens, the signal being sent to the next generation of scientists and engineers deciding where to study is unmistakable, and it is not the one the United States has spent seventy years trying to send.