Optional Practical Training Fees
quietus writes:
I am a US Citizen and a first generation college student. I have worked since I was 16 years old. I had 2 jobs when I was a sophomore through senior in high school and I worked my way through college as well. I struggled for decades to make a living and pay my federal student loans back. I have learned that schools not only give foreign students lot of scholarships, but actively recruit them to come here and attend. Then I complete against them for jobs and they are hired over me because they can fluently speak a second language.
Thus opens a comment by one Ecstacy Smith on a new regulation proposal by the Trump administration. Under the proposal, Optional Practical Training Fees, US Universities need to pay up to $100,000 for each international student who, after graduation, works a science job in the country.
Currently, under a program called Optional Practical Training (OPT), foreign students (F-1 or M-1 visa) are eligible to work for 3 years after graduating a US university, on condition that employment must be directly related to the student's major area of study. In 2024, there were 1.58 million foreign graduates in the United States. Twenty-six percent (418,781) of those were authorized to work via OPT.
According to a source quoted by Nature, OPT is especially important for international PhD graduates in STEM fields. The DHS/ICE claims the scheme has seen widespread fraudulent abuse:
Most recently, DHS announced an investigation that identified more than 10,000 F-1 nonimmigrant students who were engaged in OPT and were working for highly suspect employers.
The current administration has good form in combating fraud and abuse this way: in 2025 Trump imposed a $100,000 levy on a visa reserved for researchers and other high-skilled workers. As a result, new applications for those visas plummeted by 90%, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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