Student Union
Rate of Foreign Students Staying to Work in US Slows
After rising sharply over the past decade, the rate at which foreign-student graduates are applying to stay in the U.S. to work has waned.
A record 276,500 foreign graduates received work permits through a U.S. program called Optional Practical Training (OPT) in 2017, according to Pew Research Center, an independent research group. That was in addition to nearly 1.5 million foreign graduates who received OPT work permits between 2004 and 2016.
But the rate of growth slowed, Pew found.
"The number of enrollees grew by 8 percent in 2017," Pew reports, "compared with 34 percent in 2016."
Trends in OPT generally follow international student enrollment on U.S. college campuses, says Rajika Bhandari, senior adviser for research and strategy for the Institute of International Education (IIE).
"It is not surprising that OPT enrollment would begin to taper as international student enrollment also began to slow," Bhandari says. "The slowing down of overall international student enrollments is attributable to a mix of factors, including competition from higher education systems across the world and changes to government-funded scholarships in Saudi Arabia and Brazil – both among the top 10 sending countries to the United States."
The number of international students -- including OPT students -- grew by 3.4 percent in 2016-2017, according to IIE's Open Doors annual report on international students in the U.S. Compare that to increases of 7.1 percent in 2015-2016, and 10 percent in 2014-2015.
Also, in 2016, the U.S. government introduced a travel ban on immigrants -- including student immigrants -- from seven Muslim-majority countries. It later removed Iraq from the travel ban, leaving six countries -- Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya -- restricted from entering the United States. But most of the 1,078,822 international students enrolled in the U.S. come from China (33 percent) and India (17 percent), followed by 5 percent or less from South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico and Brazil, respectively.
OPT program
Foreigners who study full time in the U.S. typically have F-1 and M-1 visas and are restricted from working off campus, according to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services website. The F or M visa expires three months after graduation, unless extended for additional study. However, the OPT program offers graduates a temporary work visa, as long as the work is in the graduate's field of study. Other employment is prohibited.
Before 2008, most OPT visas were issued for 12 months of temporary work. But in 2008 and 2016, the federal government expanded OPT rules, which greatly increased student availability in the workforce.
For science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degree holders, the government in 2008 extended the OPT visa to 29 months. Then, in 2016, the U.S. government extended the OPT duration to 36 months for STEM students, which increased the number by about 400 percent.
This made those international graduate OPT holders more desirable to employers, says Neil Ruiz, lead author of the Pew report. At the same time, it made STEM degree programs more desirable to international students.
Except for business and management degrees, STEM is the No. 1 program of choice for international students, according to the Institute of International Education, which reports each year about the state of international students in the U.S.
“Those are the majors of foreign graduates who are staying in the U.S. that have seen the biggest growth,” Ruiz told VOA.
Recent changes to OPT
But in January 2017, President Donald Trump's administration changed the rules governing the program. The change limited OPT participants to work directly for an employer, excluding employment as contractors, who are not hired directly by a company, but by a service or agency.
Ruiz says the rate of growth of foreign graduates staying in the U.S. to work posted its largest drop in 13 years last year.
Bhandari, the senior adviser for IIE, argues that this will do little to stop international students from seeking jobs in the U.S.
She says the terrorist attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, led the government to take a much stronger position on immigration. This led to one of the biggest decreases in international students at U.S. colleges and universities in the country’s history.
But students returned a few years later, Bhandari adds, citing the high demand internationally for American higher education. The U.S. is not only known for quality of education, but freedom of thought and innovation.
“The U.S. really provides this perfect environment for people who want to stay on and … be innovators and really contribute in a meaningful way to a knowledge economy,” Bhandari says.
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U.S. universities are welcoming international students as the academic year begins. But while the total number of foreign students is steadily growing, the top sending country, China, is showing signs of leveling out or shrinking.
Industry analysts say the negative trend is mainly due to higher costs amid China’s struggling economy, with a growing number of students going to less expensive countries like Australia and Britain, and tense ties between Washington and Beijing.
The number of foreign students studying in the U.S. in 2022-23 passed 1 million for the first time since the COVID pandemic, said Open Doors, an information resource on international students and scholars.
While the U.S. saw a nearly 12% total increase year-on-year for that period, the number of international students from China, its top source, fell by 0.2% to 289,526.
That’s 600 fewer students than the 2021-22 academic year, when their numbers dropped by nearly 9%. The COVID pandemic saw Chinese student numbers drop in 2020-21 by nearly 15%, in line with the world total drop.
While it’s not yet clear if the drop is a leveling out or a fluctuating decline, analysts say China’s struggling economy and the high cost of studying in the U.S. are the main reasons for the fall in student numbers.
Vincent Chen, a Chinese study abroad consultant based in Shanghai, said although most of his clients are still interested in studying in the U.S., there is a clear downward trend, while applicants for Anglophone universities in Australia and Britain have been increasing.
"If you just want to go abroad, a one-year master's degree in the U.K. is much cheaper,” Chen said. “Many people can't afford to study in the U.S., so they have to settle for the next best thing."
Data from the nonprofit U.S. group College Board Research shows that in the 2023-24 academic year, the average tuition and fees for a U.S. private college four-year education increased 4% to $41,540 compared with the previous academic year.
The British Council said three to four years of undergraduate tuition in Britain starts as low as $15,000.
The number of Chinese students in Britain was 154,260 in 2022-23, according to the U.K. Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA, up from 121,145 in the 2018/19 academic year.
Australia’s Home Affairs office said in the 2023-24 program year, China was the top source foreign country for new student visa grants at 43,389, up slightly (1.5%) from the previous year.
Chen said Chinese state media's negative portrayal of the United States and concerns about discrimination have also contributed to the shift.
Bruce Zhang, a Chinese citizen who received his master's degree in Europe after studying in China, told VOA Mandarin he had such an incident occur to him after he was admitted to a U.S. university’s Ph.D. program.
When he entered Boston's Logan International Airport last year, Zhang said customs officers questioned him for more than an hour about his research, and if it had any links to the military, and took his computer and mobile phone for examination.
"Fortunately, I had heard that U.S. customs might be stringent in inspecting Chinese students, so I had relatively few study-related data and documents on my personal computer," he said.
Zhang was allowed to enter the U.S. for his studies in materials science, but the questioning left him so rattled that he has encouraged other Chinese to study elsewhere.
Cui Kai, a study abroad consultant in Massachusetts told VOA Mandarin that experiences like Zhang’s or worse happen for a reason.
"Students who were questioned or their visas were revoked at the customs are usually those who completed their undergraduate studies in China and come to the U.S. for a master's or doctoral degree in a sensitive major," said Cui.
Former President Donald Trump signed Proclamation 10043 in June 2020, prohibiting visas for any Chinese student who “has been employed by, studied at, or conducted research at or on behalf of, an entity in the PRC that implements or supports the PRC's “military-civil fusion strategy.”
The U.S. says China has been using students and scholars to gain access to key technology and, under Proclamation 10043, revoked more than 1,000 visas issued to Chinese nationals and has denied thousands more.
Critics say the policy is costly to the U.S. and is encouraging Chinese students to look to European and other universities.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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