Proposed F-1 visa change could limit students to four years in the U.S.

In August, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced intentions to revamp the visa program through which most international students enter the country. Among the changes, DHS proposed limiting students’ length of stay to four years, a move directly at odds with the six-year average it takes to complete a physics Ph.D. in the U.S. After four years, students would need to apply for an extension.

“Such a policy would fundamentally impact graduate education in the U.S.,” says a Caltech astrophysicist who requested anonymity. He came to the U.S. as an international student to attend a top-ranked astronomy Ph.D. program, earning the degree in about five years.

“The excellent students that get admitted to U.S. universities are typically people with other options,” he says. If this change is implemented, “many will choose to take their talents elsewhere.”

The proposed rule change would apply to nonimmigrant academic students on F-1 visas and exchange visitors on J-1 visas, a category that includes many postdocs and visiting scientists. Currently, people with F and J visas can remain in the country as long as they are engaged in authorized activities, a period known as the duration of status. Effectively, a full-time student making sufficient progress toward a degree can stay in the country until they complete their education.

The new DHS plan eliminates the duration of status, stipulating that F and J visa holders be approved for no more than four years. Students unable to complete their degree in that time period would have to apply for an extension of stay with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Without an extension in effect by the end date on their visa, they would be out of status even while actively pursuing a degree.

The comment period for the proposed rule change has closed, and no timeline for a decision has been announced.

The visa process is already marked by uncertainty, fees, paperwork, and hard-to-get appointments, says a graduate student from India pursuing a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at a U.S. university in the Mid-Atlantic. “Even if you have a visa — you have everything — if there's something suspicious about you at the border, you can be turned away.”

The four-year limit isn’t the only visa rule in flux. DHS’s proposal would also prohibit graduate students from changing programs and reduce the time they have to prepare for departure from 60 to 30 days. Also, in the last several months, DHS has unexpectedly cancelled select student visas, suspended visa interviews in some countries, and introduced an additional $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa petitions.

Among international graduate students, there’s a growing sense that you can’t express your ideas freely or make any mistakes, says a materials science and engineering graduate student from Latin America. The U.S. has good infrastructure for innovation, she says, but a rising fear is competing with research productivity.

“If I had known how the trajectory of this country was going,” says an international graduate student from a Caribbean nation who earned his bachelor’s degree in the U.S., “I might have put in a little more effort to research a new place, a new country [for graduate school].” The second-year student says that four years is just not realistic for an experimental degree, something many international students come to the U.S. to pursue.

The length of your Ph.D. program depends on how well your project works, how hard you work, and luck, says Artem Abanov, a physics professor and associate head of the department’s graduate program at Texas A&M University. In 20 years of teaching, he’s never seen a physics student go from a bachelor’s degree to Ph.D. in four years. Ph.D. projects are unpredictable by nature, he says. “If it were predictable, it would not be research.”

Abanov was a physics graduate student in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, and he followed his research advisor to Texas A&M. A Ph.D. and two postdocs later, he landed a faculty position at the university, where he’s been since. This story has been common in science, he says. But if you tell students that in four years, they’ll have visa problems, “that’s a huge deterrent,” he says. “People just would not come.”

And even if some international students want to come, departments may decide it's too risky to invest in students who might not be allowed to finish their degrees, Abanov says.

“This is fundamental upheaval to the system,” says Michael Wittmann, head of education at the American Physical Society. Over the last five years, around 47% of the physics doctorates conferred by U.S. institutions went to noncitizens, according to American Institute of Physics surveys. If the U.S. becomes less desirable for these students, there will be fallout across the pipeline, Wittmann says.

Around 70% of the international students on temporary visas who earn doctorates in the U.S. in science, engineering, and health fields stay in the country to work and conduct research, according to a 2024 National Science Board report. APS expects that under the proposed change, departments would be under threat, research productivity would slow, and gaps would emerge in the STEM workforce.

“If this policy is enacted, it will be an enormous boon for universities in Europe and across the world, not to mention for the economies,” the Caltech astrophysicist says. “After they graduate, many of these students currently go on to make key discoveries, launch start-ups, design new technologies, lead cutting-edge medical research, and educate the next generation of Americans.”

In September, APS submitted a public comment to DHS opposing the proposed changes to duration of status and encouraged members to do the same. And more recently, APS led several scientific societies and federations in filing an amici curiae brief, a kind of expert opinion to the courts, in support of a lawsuit brought against Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and others by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. The suit alleges that the current administration has adopted arbitrary, unlawful policies that damage the system by which international students pursue higher education in the U.S.

The societies filed the brief in early October. It reads, in part, “an unreliable, inconsistent, or capricious U.S. visa process hampers the U.S.’s ability to attract the best and brightest international scholars and harms the nation’s scientific dominance, innovation, and economic competitiveness.”

Wittmann hopes DHS will extend the four-year limit or discard the proposed rule changes, but “we have to act like it’s what they plan to do,” he says. To that end, APS is developing a detailed toolkit to help departments navigate a scenario in which the new rules take effect.

Funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the toolkit will be integrated into the EP3 Guide, Effective Practices for Physics Programs. Bennett Goldberg, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern University, and Jenny Samaan, a higher education consultant, are currently interviewing members of the physics community to identify potential consequences and explore solutions, says Wittmann. They hope to release a white paper before the end of the year and debut the toolkit at the Global Physics Summit in March.

“The killing of research productivity is the major threat to the physics enterprise,” Wittmann says. “This is going to be a difficult time, requiring creative solutions that need to focus on the well-being of the students.”

The views expressed by scientists in this article are their own and do not reflect the official positions or policies of their universities.