Trump's Proposed $100,000 OPT Fee: What It Means for Indian Students in America

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A proposal is reportedly under consideration by the Trump administration to impose a $100,000 fee on international students seeking to work in the United States after graduation. This news has rattled universities and employers alike, who warn it could upend the financial logic of an American education for hundreds of thousands of foreign students.

The plan, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by Bloomberg, is not a full-blown policy yet. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are reportedly discussing attaching the fee to Optional Practical Training (OPT), the program that lets international graduates work in the US for up to one year after finishing their degree (or up to three years for STEM graduates). It remains unclear whether the fee, if adopted, would fall on students, employers or universities.

A DHS spokesperson, responding to the report, did not deny the proposal was under discussion. “No policies should be considered final until formally announced. At DHS we are always having conversations about how to use all tools in our arsenal to protect the integrity of our legal immigration system,” the spokesperson said.

The idea surfaced just five days after the administration suffered a legal setback on a nearly identical measure. On July 24, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston declined to revive the White House's $100,000 H-1B visa fee, leaving intact a June 8 ruling by Judge Leo Sorokin that the charge amounted to an unlawful tax Congress had never authorized.

The OPT proposal also follows another significant policy shift finalized weeks earlier: a rule limiting most international students to fixed four-year visas which replaced the decades-old “duration of status” system that had allowed students to remain in the US for as long as they stayed enrolled in an eligible program. Taken together, the two moves point to a broader tightening of legal pathways for foreign students.

As always, our EB-1A consultants have dissected and discussed this news in great detail in what follows. Reading it will provide a comprehensive idea about the challenges the OPT program is currently facing.

Why OPT matters so much for international students

OPT is widely regarded as one of the central reasons international students choose to study in the US at all. It allows F-1 visa holders to work in their field after graduation while still technically on a student visa. Under the program, STEM graduates can extend that authorization to 36 months. Moreover, they can use the time to gain professional experience and, often, to transition to an employer-sponsored H-1B visa.

According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 419,000 foreign graduates were working under OPT in 2024, which would make it one of the largest post-study work channels in the country. The Institute of International Education has separately reported that nearly 300,000 international students were on OPT as of last fall. The number is about a quarter of the entire foreign student population in the US, according to Bloomberg reporting.

For Indian students, who make up the largest international student population in the country, OPT is frequently the deciding factor that justifies the steep cost of American tuition. Annual costs at private US universities can exceed $100,000, and even public universities often charge international students tens of thousands of dollars a year. Many families weigh this expense against the prospect of eventually working, and earning, in the US.

Administration officials have defended targeting the program, arguing it has become a vector for visa fraud and unlawful overstays, according to Bloomberg.

The proposal echoes the administration's earlier push to attach an identical $100,000 price tag to H-1B visas, the primary channel through which US companies recruit skilled foreign workers. That fee was struck down by a federal judge. The ruling was subsequently upheld on appeal, and the administration is contesting it further.

Why immigration experts are worried about the proposal

Higher education groups warn that a $100,000 OPT fee would make American universities markedly less competitive against countries such as Canada, the UK and Australia. The Journal reported that universities fear the move could depress international enrollment while technology companies and Wall Street firms worry it would choke off a key talent pipeline.

In an analysis for the Brookings Institution, immigration lawyer Taylor Joseph of Green & Spiegel and Ezra Brown of Cornell Law School argued that replacing “duration of status” with fixed visa terms injects fresh uncertainty for both students and employers, and that international graduates play an outsized role in the US innovation economy.

The pair noted that F-1 visa holders (roughly 1.2 million people, about 6% of the US student population) indirectly benefit domestic students too, since each additional international student enrolling at a public university tends to draw in two additional in-state students. If prospective students choose to study elsewhere instead, they wrote, “they are very likely to end up staying there, depriving the United States of their economic benefit.”

They also cautioned that the added cost and uncertainty could deepen a decline already underway. US international student applications have reportedly fallen 20% amid what they described as a “heightened immigration enforcement environment.”

Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, called the broader regulatory push “a misguided and unnecessary policy shift that injects uncertainty, bureaucracy, and fear into a system that has long worked effectively,” and criticized federal intervention in students' academic decisions, such as changing majors or transferring schools.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association was similarly blunt, arguing on social media that the rule “duplicates processes already managed through SEVIS” and forms part of a wider effort to dismantle the legal immigration system.

The legal question mark about this proposal

Immigration attorneys say any OPT fee introduced through executive action would likely face the same kind of legal challenge that felled the H-1B fee. “The inconsistencies in these rulings, and the appeals status of these cases, leave the ultimate fate of the fee still very much in limbo,” said Melissa Calhoon Jones, counsel at Tydings Law.

Law firm Nixon Peabody has pointed out that employers already lean heavily on OPT for long-term workforce planning and that recent regulatory shifts are forcing companies to rethink how they manage international hires. “Schools will need to consider building new compliance workflows to track I-94 expiration dates, advise students on timely EOS filing... and account for the immigration consequences of academic probation or suspension,” the firm noted. The remark also added that employers will face new pressure to coordinate OPT and STEM OPT timing with H-1B sponsorship earlier in a graduate's employment lifecycle.

What happens next

For the time being, the fee remains a proposal under internal discussion instead of already becoming a published rule, and DHS has stressed nothing is final until formally announced. But taken alongside the four-year visa cap and the contested H-1B fee, it adds to a pattern of measures the administration is adopting towards the overall legal immigration system.

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