A new proposal from the US Department of Homeland Security would raise the fee attached to post-study work authorisation from $500 to as much as $70,000 per new student, with a further $30,000 charge for each renewal. Announced this week, the plan targets the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme — the route that lets F-1 visa holders work in the US for a year after graduating, with STEM graduates eligible for up to two extra years.
Universities would formally pay the fees, but the regulation as drafted would let them pass costs on to students or the employers hoping to hire them. Officials frame the change as a crackdown on fraud and on companies using the programme to source cheaper foreign labour. Critics see something else: the effective dismantling of the largest guest-worker channel in the US immigration system by annual approvals.
The consequences would ripple well beyond campus. Employers in tech, engineering and the sciences routinely hire international graduates for specialised roles, and a five-figure price tag per hire could make those candidates unaffordable. Fanta Aw, executive director of NAFSA, the international education association, has warned that pushing foreign students away would damage innovation and the wider US workforce. Universities have their own incentive to worry: international students often pay higher tuition than domestic ones, so a less attractive US study proposition means lost revenue too.
The proposal is not yet law. A 60-day public comment period is underway, and the final rule could be amended, delayed or challenged in court by universities and business groups. But for prospective students — including the thousands of Colombians who choose American universities each year — the maths is shifting in real time. Many take on serious debt expecting to work in the US afterwards to recover tuition and living costs; if that pathway narrows, the return on an American degree gets much harder to justify.
If you're weighing a US degree for the coming years, this is a story to follow closely. Track the rulemaking process before committing to an expensive programme, ask universities directly how they plan to handle OPT-related costs, and compare destinations: Canada, the UK, Australia and several European countries all offer post-study work routes of their own, and the gap between them and the US may be about to widen considerably. For anyone already enrolled, the current rules still apply until anything is finalised — but budgeting for uncertainty is now part of the plan.
