How new rules could affect international students at U.S., Arizona colleges and universities

The Trump administration is implementing new rules for international students at American colleges and universities.

Under these new rules, those students will generally be limited to staying in this country for four years unless they get an extension; students have previously been allowed to stay until they finished their programs.

Supporters of the change say it’ll cut down on the number of international students who come to the country for school and don’t leave. Critics, meanwhile, argue many students need more than four years to finish their degrees — especially post-graduate ones.

Johanna Alonso, admissions and enrollment reporter with Inside Higher Ed, joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Johanna, good morning. Thanks for being here.

JOHANNA ALONZO: Thank you so much for having me.

MARK BRODIE: So, what is the thinking behind this? Why is the administration trying to implement these?

JOHANNA ALONZO: Well, you basically nailed it on the head in the intro. There is this um the way that they described it is that they're worried about overstays, so students who remain in the country longer than they should or who continue to take classes as a means of staying in the country longer. And they did provide some data in this regulation that says that there are about I think they said 2,000 or 2,100 students who entered the country on an F1 visa between 2000 and 2010 and are still here.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, that doesn't seem like a whole lot when you look at the universe of college students in this country.

JOHANNA ALONZO: No, I do think that the the number is relatively small. And then also that 2000 to uh sorry, um yeah, 2000 to 2010 range is pretty big, so we don't know if the students have been here for 26 years or 16 years. But yeah.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So, I mentioned that there is the possibility of getting an extension. Is there a sense of like what that process will look like or how easy or difficult it might be for a student let's say they come for undergrad and want to stay for grad school like how easy it might be to get an extension?

JOHANNA ALONZO: That is a really good question. So, in the rule itself, it is discretionary, but they did sort of say, people we know people are really worried about this, this won't be hard for students that have legitimate reasons to need to stay beyond four years. Um So, we're not 100% sure what that's going to look like. It's going to be a while till this starts happening and till we know what it's going to look like.

The fear from some students and some international education professionals is that the government doesn't always understand nuances of higher ed, of, you know, very specific programs or research that might require students to stay longer. And there are some fears that the government and USCIS will look at something that is very academically legitimate but they might not understand the nuances of it and that could cause some issues.

MARK BRODIE: What are universities saying about this? I mean, especially, you know, big public universities like here in Arizona like they you know, really kind of rely on international students paying out of country tuition to, you know, to bring in a good amount of money.

JOHANNA ALONZO: Yes, that is absolutely true. International students, a lot of them pay full tuition, and a lot of schools do rely on that tuition. And on top of that, there is this question of the workload for the institutions. A lot of worry that they're going to have to hire more staff just to sort of facilitate these extension requests, and that that could be very costly as well, so it's not even just about the tuition.

MARK BRODIE: Well, that's interesting. So it might not just be on the students to do it, maybe a selling point for a university could be, hey, if you need an extension, we will help you with that.

JOHANNA ALONZO: I think a lot of institutions would be planning to do that. You know, most institutions that have a significant number of international students have staff members that help with different parts of the visa process.

Ultimately, I think most schools, both because, yeah, they do get that international student tuition and and that can be very beneficial, but I think if you're admitted to a school, most schools are are interested in helping you succeed there. They don't want you to leave after four years with an incomplete degree. So yeah, I think I think in most cases schools are definitely planning to help with that part of the process.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. How do the rules in this country compare to American students or other foreign students going to other foreign countries and how long they're allowed to be there and what, you know, what the the status is there?

JOHANNA ALONZO: Yeah, this is a good question. And I will say this is not my absolute area of expertise, but I will say my understanding is that in a lot of countries, there are some limits to initially how long your visa lasts when you're studying internationally. In a lot of countries, it is not this blanket four-year policy. It is more that if you enter and you're going to be doing XYZ degree, and the institution says, yeah, this is a five-year degree, your visa will be five years.

So, the U.S., the duration of status rule that allowed students to stay until they were done actually was fairly unique in its flexibility. It's coming a little bit more towards what some other countries have, but there are still distinctions between this new four-year policy and what is common elsewhere.

MARK BRODIE: So, this is obviously not the first time the Trump administration has tried to enact or enacted a policy related to international students. I'm curious what you're hearing from universities and maybe what you're hearing from from other professionals in this space in terms of what the overall impact has been and sort of where this rule might fit into that.

JOHANNA ALONZO: Yeah, so all of last year, we had quite a few uh troubling things for international students, including folks might remember when students' SEVIS statuses were terminated. This is the online database that tracks international students. That was a big ordeal. There was a freeze on F1 visa interviews early in the summer of 2025. That led to some big delays and students having problem problems getting those interviews.

So, there was a lot of anticipation that international student numbers would decline, and they did. There were a few different sources that showed declines in international students, declines in new international student visas, which is a pretty good indicator. This is something that's sometimes sort of hard to measure and we're getting different numbers from different sources, but I do think that decline in new F1 visas was a pretty good tell.

So, I think that those worries are coming true, and this could be you know, it's all these factors coming together. It's both like if you can't get a visa interview, it's it's just not going to happen. But I think there's also the fear of something going awry while you're here.

And as the U.S., one of the biggest draws for students was, you know, this flexibility. Duration of status is really, really attractive. OPT, which is the system that allows students to work after international students to work after they graduate, that it still exists, but um it's something that the Trump administration has indicated they might not be a huge fan of, um and that's another huge selling point.

So, I think students are just more saying like, the things that we really thought were cool about going to the U.S. to study like we're not 100% sure that they're that they're as as strong as they once were.

MARK BRODIE: Sure, interesting. All right. That is Johanna Alonzo, admissions and enrollment reporter with Inside Higher Ed. Johanna, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

JOHANNA ALONZO: Thank you as well.

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