As changes to student visas take effect, APS toolkit offers expert guidance

Beginning on Sept. 15, 2026, visas for international students and scholars will have a fixed admissions period capped at four years — much shorter than the 6.2-year average time to complete a physics Ph.D. In recognition of the potentially broad and far-reaching implications, APS has developed a toolkit to help department leaders, research advisors, and international students navigate the situation.

“International students make up nearly half of our graduate student population, and grad students are the lifeblood of the academic research space,” says Michael Wittmann, head of education at APS. “This rule could have a major impact.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security proposed F and J visa changes in August 2025 that included replacing the “duration of status” allowance — which enabled international students to stay as long as they were making progress toward a degree — with a calendar deadline not to exceed four years. Students needing more time would have to apply to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service for an extension of stay. DHS also proposed restricting graduate students from changing programs or institutions.

The proposal received nearly 22,000 responses during an open comment period, including a letter from APS, but DHS didn’t make any substantive changes based on the feedback, says Jenny Samaan, a consultant on international higher education and co-creator of the APS toolkit. The final rule was published in July.

Last fall, APS enlisted Samaan and Bennett Goldberg, a physics professor at Northwestern University, to dive into the preliminary regulations and interview members of the physics community — from department chairs to prospective international students — about the situation and their concerns. Samaan and Goldberg released a white paper in January highlighting their findings, which laid the foundation for the toolkit.

Now part of the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Guide, the toolkit is based on gaps and needs that emerged from the interviews. It features concrete resources and a list of practical short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations explicitly for chairs and department leadership, research advisors, and international students.

A major gap relates to department culture, Goldberg says. Most U.S. physics departments have never discussed immigration or visa rules as a group because there wasn’t a need, but “the new regulations change that landscape,” he says. International students and their advisors will need to closely track academic progress in order to request an extension of stay. In addition, international offices are likely to be overwhelmed and international students may need more support, given the pressure to finish quickly or risk losing their status. Departments may also need to discuss curricular or admissions changes as a result of the new visa rule.

To help initiate these conversations, the toolkit provides a template and slide deck that department chairs can use to introduce the F and J visa changes to faculty, email templates for international students who need to discuss their academic progress with their advisor, links to vetted resources with up-to-date information, and an academic progress tracking tool.

Jie Ren, a PhD physicist at Merck and member of the toolkit advisory board, came to graduate school in the U.S. on a student visa. “The advantage of the research environment setup here [was] that you [got] time to actually do real things for science and publish them without the threat of losing your status,” she says. The new rule is a fundamental shift in how international students are treated, she says.

Working in industry, Ren is now on the hiring end of the talent pipeline. The visa changes add an extra burden to the hiring process, and if they dissuade students from coming to the U.S. for graduate school in the first place, “we will lose the opportunity to hire them,” she says. The toolkit aims “to preserve the basic research infrastructure that depends so much on those talent pipelines,” Ren says.

“This is something that is going to impact everyone,” says Stamatis Vokos, a physics professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and toolkit advisory board member. “Faculty and chairs and graduate program coordinators need to be aware of these changes,” he says, “they need to be aware of the toolkit, and they need to be aware of the issues in order to come alongside the current international students.”

As the next phase in the toolkit, Samaan and Goldberg are building a database of case studies documenting how programs are trying to address the visa changes. The hope is to create a source of information for departments, linked in the toolkit, so that departments don’t have to come up with solutions on their own.

So much is happening with science funding, science priorities, and visa changes that it’s tempting to keep your head down and focus solely on research, Vokos says, but that won’t get us where we want to be. “We have to engage with the community.”