On July 16, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published new rules governing student visas. According to the updated federal policy, people who enter the U.S. on a student visa must complete their degree within four years — whether pursuing an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, or a Ph.D. International students pursuing graduate studies at American universities will also not be able to change the subject of their studies or transfer between academic institutions. (Undergraduates may change or transfer after one year.) Within 30 days of completing their degree, they will need to arrange a new visa (sponsored, for example, by an employer) or leave the country.
Last week, university groups and labor unions filed a lawsuit to try to block the new rules, arguing that they would be “catastrophic” for higher education and the country at-large. But unless the court case succeeds, the rules are set to go into effect on Sept. 15 and apply across all fields of study and students’ countries of origin.
The new requirements are certain to be disruptive for undergraduate students. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, fewer than half of enrolled students — just 44 percent — complete their (nominally four-year) undergraduate degree in four years. The problem will be more severe for doctoral candidates. The latest study by the National Science Foundation reveals that the typical (median) time to complete a Ph.D. in the U.S. across all fields is nearly six years. Not a single field reported a median Ph.D. completion time shorter than five years.
Under the new rules, if a student on a visa requires more than four years to complete their degree — as the vast majority of Ph.D. students do — they will need to apply directly to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for a formal “Extension of Stay.” This marks a pivot from the current provision known as “duration of status,” in which full-time students who are making appropriate progress, as determined by university officials, can continue their studies through to completion. The shift would mean that government bureaucrats at USCIS, rather than academic advisers, will now have complete discretion over whether to grant extensions, according to (as yet) unknown criteria and procedures. This is the same agency that presently has a backlog of more than 11 million pending cases, and average processing times that stretch well beyond a year.
Meanwhile, the nation’s Ph.D. programs include considerably higher proportions of international students than typical undergraduate programs do. This means that advanced research efforts across the country, which depend upon doctoral students’ contributions, will be disproportionately affected.
The new requirements are certain to be disruptive for undergraduate students. The problem will be more severe for doctoral candidates.
Averaged across all fields in the U.S., one-third of Ph.D. recipients in 2024 pursued their graduate studies on student visas. The proportion of international students is higher in fields that the current and recent administrations have prioritized as essential for national competitiveness: computer and information science (58 percent), engineering (51 percent), mathematics and statistics (49 percent), and physical sciences (39 percent) — areas in which young innovators are advancing research on artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, materials science, and more.
For decades, the U.S. has prospered from a “brain gain,” attracting talented students from around the world. Graduate students who entered the U.S. on student visas — such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan, and even Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who began a graduate program before deciding, two days later, to try to found his own company — have bolstered the American economy.
The new rules risk losing future talent. Doctoral programs cannot instantly adjust students’ timelines to accommodate the new rules. U.S. graduate programs typically require advanced coursework, capped by rigorous examinations. This breadth of training has long undergirded the quality of American Ph.D. programs, adding to their appeal for domestic and international students alike.
More important, the research phase of a Ph.D. requires students to move beyond known material and to produce something new — to push past what today’s textbooks already include. That sort of innovation rarely happens overnight. The benefits, however, can shape generations. Just think of transistors, lasers, PET scans, atomic clocks, and GPS navigation technologies, let alone neural networks and quantum encryption protocols. Each of these wonders began as the subject of basic research, to which waves of creative young graduate students have crafted novel insights and improvements.
The proportion of international students is higher in fields that the current and recent administrations have prioritized as essential for national competitiveness.
Why derail graduate education now? The reason certainly can’t be lack of demand for highly trained specialists. Consider recent trends for H1-B visas, which are restricted to individuals with specific educational qualifications who can fill so-called “specialty occupations.” Despite the current administration’s efforts to limit access to such visas, U.S. employers have submitted more than 800,000 H1-B registrations since 2025, of which roughly a third have been granted.
Upon unveiling the new student-visa rules earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed — without citing evidence — that the new regulation was necessary in order to halt large-scale abuses of the U.S. immigration system.
The student-visa system, which is now decades-old, likely could be improved. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the new student-visa policy is drastic, self-defeating, and just bad math.
David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His latest book is “Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World” (University of Chicago Press, 2000).