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October 23, 2026
What OPT Is and How It Affects the Economy in 6 Charts
Researchers who have studied high-skilled immigration say that international students on OPT often bring innovation, entrepreneurship and job opportunities for domestic employees.
Researchers have found that workers on OPT often work in high-demand fields.
Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | seb_ra/iStock/
The Trump administration’s proposed rule to charge colleges as much as $100,000 for their international students to participate in a temporary work program after graduation won’t just impact those students, experts argue.
A growing body of research into the impacts of highly skilled immigration on the American economy shows that international workers like those using optical practical training tend to spark innovation, build businesses and create new jobs—benefits that would be harder to realize if the OPT fee goes into effect.
“There is definitely a mentality and a belief among a lot of people that every student who works on OPT is literally taking a job from an American worker, and the thing that’s borne out of the economic literature is not so much that,” said Violet Buxton-Walsh, an immigration fellow with the Institute for Progress, a think tank focused on innovation. “It’s much more that OPT graduates are complements, not substitutes, to American workers.”
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The fee is not yet final; the rule was proposed by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month and is currently accepting public comments. A similar fee for H-1B was struck down by a judge.
Experts warn that the proposed fee would severely handicap—if not outright eradicate—the OPT program, which was formalized in 1992 under the George H.W. Bush administration, further expanded in 2008 and expanded once more in 2016, with the goal of bringing top global talent to the U.S. In recent years, the program has comeunderfire from conservatives for supposedly taking jobs away from Americans and opening the doors for international students to stay in the U.S. through fraudulent employment schemes.
But the program has become a key driver to bring international students to the United States. Advocates for international students worry that the fee, compounded with the administration’s otherrestrictions on international students, could lead to even steeper declines in their enrollment.
Unlike other visa programs, the government does not publish comprehensive data about OPT, so much of the research that exists uses proxies or focuses on high-skilled immigration broadly. Some organizations have also obtained more detailed information from colleges and surveys. The IFP is home to a large open-ia a public records requests covering 16 years of data. Still, even that data was spotty, Buxton-Walsh said
Despite those hiccups, the body of research that does exist shows how the program contributes to the U.S. economy and hints at how impactful limiting it could be.
The number of international students working on OPT has never been higher, according to data from the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that facilitates international exchange programs. Since the 2015–16 academic year, the number of individuals on OPT has nearly doubled from roughly 147,000 to about 294,000. OPT participants also make up about a quarter of all F-1 visa holders in the U.S., compared to 15.4 percent a decade ago.
Most of that growth has been among graduates of master’s programs IFP’s repository of data. That tracks with overall international student numbers, as the highest proportion of F-1 students are master’s students
The growing number of students opting in to OPT also indicates that the program is becoming increasingly popular. In surveys, international students frequently report that OPT is a key reason they wanted to study in the U.S. and that they would be less likely to come to the U.S. without it.
