Trump administration proposes four-year cap on student visas

The United States’ Department of Homeland Security has proposed to limit all international students to four-year stays in the US regardless of their programme length, potentially ending a policy that allowed students to remain throughout their studies.

The draft rules were proposed on August 27 and the department will take public comments on the proposal till September 29.

Before the agency can finalise the rule, it will have to review and respond to the comments.

International student visas in the US, known as F visas, typically allows students to stay in the country for as long as it takes to finish their programme. Therefore, they can stay in the US as long as they maintain their student status, rather than being given a fixed end date.

If the new rules are finalised, students requiring more than four years to complete their course would need to apply for extensions and undergo regular assessments by the homeland security department.

The Donald Trump administration, during its first term between 2017 and 2021, had tried to introduce this change. The proposal was withdrawn by the Joe Biden administration.

“For too long, past administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the US virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amounts of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging US citizens,” a spokesperson of the homeland security department said in a statement.

The statement added: “This new proposed rule would end that abuse once and for all by limiting the amount of time certain visa holders are allowed to remain in the US, easing the burden on the federal government to properly oversee foreign students and history.”

The change is expected to affect doctoral programmes, which typically require five years to seven years to complete.

NAFSA, a non-profit organisation working on issues related to international students, said that participants in PhD programmes will particularly face hardship as the median time to complete a doctorate is 5.7 years, citing data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

The PhD scholars could take 7.3 years to complete their programme, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, NAFSA said.

These fields have attracted heavy Indian enrolment among the 331,000 Indian students currently studying in the US.

A doctoral student at Columbia University in New York, who did not want to be identified, said that PhD programmes “aren’t like coursework with set timelines”.

“My research has taken five years so far, and I still have at least another year of writing ahead of me,” the student said. “The uncertainty of needing government approval to finish would be overwhelming.”

Fanta Aw, the executive director of NAFSA, said that the homeland security department’s proposal is a “bad idea” and a “dangerous overreach by the government into academia”.

“It would give DHS oversight over decisions that have long been the domain of academia, including changes to a student’s course of study and to their level of study,” Aw said.

“International students and exchange visitors are already rigorously tracked in the SEVIS database and are the most closely monitored in the country,” Aw added.

The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System tracks all international students and exchange visitors in the US.

Aw said that the government’s “interference into the academic realm in this way introduces a wholly unnecessary and new level of uncertainty to international student experience” in the US.

NAFSA has been tracking enforcement actions against international students since March 2025, two months after Donald Trump was sworn-in as the president in January for the second term.

The organisation has documented more than 800 cases of visa revocations and student record terminations hurting students from all regions at institutions across the country.

NAFSA also projected that visa restrictions and processing delays could cause a 30% to 40% decline in the enrolment of new international students this fall, or between September and December.

A report from the Institute of International Education, which collected feedback from hundreds of higher education institutions in the US, found that 35% of the schools they surveyed saw a decrease in applications for this year’s fall season.

This comes as the US is tightening its immigration restrictions and expanding social media checks, with visa appointments briefly halted at embassies and consulates in India in May.