Critics of the policy say it could prevent international students from studying in the United States.
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The US Department of Homeland Security repealed a long-standing policy on Thursday that allowed international students to stay in the US until they complete their studies. The new law, which will be officially published on Friday, will limit their stay in the US to four years unless they get an extension, and limit the ability of students to change majors and institutions once they are in the country.
International education leaders and experts have argued that four years is not enough time for large numbers of students to complete their degrees; almost all Ph.D. programs are longer than four years, and the average undergraduate takes more than four years to complete their bachelor’s degree. Additionally, students pursuing optional practical training, F-1 student work authorization after graduation, typically stay in the US for more than four years.
But the government has pointed out that an old policy known as temporary status allows students to stay in the US indefinitely without contact with immigration officials, leading to overstaying and national security concerns.
In the final rule, DHS recognized that students may take more than four years to complete their programs of study but said the rule is “intended as an enforcement tool and a tool to assess whether a student is maintaining normal academic progress and eligibility for F-1 status.”
Officials added that “nothing in this law would prevent students from continuing their studies and research as long as each student complies with the conditions of their non-immigrant classification. [extension of stay] the request is still pending.”
International students already in the country “can stay for the duration of their current program or four additional years.”
The first Trump administration also proposed an end to the term, but it was scrapped after Biden took office. It proposed the law and by late last summer, it had received nearly 22,000 comments, most of them opposed to the change. The comments came not only from institutions, arguing that most Ph.D. students need more than four years to complete their degrees, but also hospital leaders, who spoke about the important role that doctors who use J-1 visas play in the health care system.
Now, the law is scheduled to go into effect on September 15—60 days after it was passed.
Uncertainty and Administrative Burden
F-1 students—international students pursuing a degree at a US institution of higher education—have been granted tenure since 1979, before which they had to reapply every year. The 1978 law that created the term said the law was intended to “facilitate the admission” of international students without overburdening what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Now, overburdened immigration officials is one of the main concerns that international education experts have raised about the new law. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services currently has a backlog of more than 11.65 million cases as of the last quarter of 2025, according to the USCIS tracking of the American Immigration Council, and the average processing time is more than a year. Now that international students are required to file extensions, that backlog will worsen, and delays in processing those extensions could leave students stranded for months, unsure if they can continue their education.
“We have little faith that USCIS can really respond to the volume and the tsunami of program extensions … If USCIS says, ‘Well, we’ll be able to turn this around in X amount of time,’ I don’t believe a word of it,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA: The Association of International Educators, before the legislation was finalized. “I don’t. They’ve never done it before.”
Delo Blough, the retired director of international services, said earlier this year that he was very concerned about how many extensions would be approved. The regulation states that decisions about extensions are discretionary; It is not clear, in fact, that many extensions will be granted or that officials will be more selective. Blough noted that the government and individual immigration officials may not fully understand the rationale for a student needing more than four years to complete their studies, leading to high, unchallenged denial rates.
Blough said the law could further reduce the number of international students studying in the US, which has already declined after Trump’s repeated attacks on international students.
“If they’re going to be very strict about ‘We’re going to give very few cases after four years,’ we’re going to lose a lot. [international] graduate students,” he said.
The revocation of the status is an attempt to “solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” according to Aw, who argued that F-1 students are the most targeted type of non-immigrants to the US because they are tracked through the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, a digital records system for monitoring international and exchange students.
“If there are problems they want to fix, let’s talk about them and find solutions,” he said. “In our comment letter … we outlined what we think would be ways, but this is not the way. This is not the way to do it.”
