Breaking Down OPT and How It Affects the Economy in 6 Charts

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.”

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 come under fire 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 other restrictions 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-source repository of OPT records, which the organization received via 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, according to OPT Observatory, 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.

For international students hoping to get their foot in the door at U.S. companies, the program can be a strong draw.

Another survey by Interstride, a college and career software technology for international students, found that the top reason international students said they wanted to come to the U.S. was because of the job opportunities available.

Sam Peak, policy manager for labor and mobility at the Economic Innovation Group, a policy think tank, said that OPT serves as something of a “trial run” for students to showcase their abilities to employers and potentially be sponsored for a H-1B visa, which allows companies to hire international workers in specialty roles. For students interested in staying in the country, he said, it can be a helpful tool.

“I would describe it as the starting point for how the United States attracts top international global talents,” he said. “It’s the mechanism that allows international students who have been accepted to study at a university to try their hand in the labor markets, gain experience, build up their networks and showcase their potential to employers.”

Because OPT has such a strong influence on international students, higher education leaders and experts also worry that the OPT fee could negatively affect university enrollment and institutional revenue.

How OPT Pays Off

Inside Higher Ed

OPT critics often raise concerns that participants are taking jobs that American workers could otherwise hold. But researchers say that fear is based on misunderstandings of the labor market.

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, is currently finishing research on STEM OPT workers’ impact on innovation in the cities where they work. His findings indicate that the presence of those workers leads to the creation of new jobs and businesses. It also fuels new patents, from both STEM OPT workers themselves and U.S. natives, spurred by collaboration with their colleagues on OPT. Those figures apply to students who are on OPT and when they continue working in the U.S. after completing their OPT, if they do.

“That’s a large economic stimulus,” Clemens said. “And when a city becomes a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, that means more jobs for childcare workers and security workers and delivery workers and construction workers, and it ripples through the whole economy.”

Other research shows that demand for American workers actually increased in areas where OPT participants settled, possibly because those OPT workers created new companies—though the study did find a decrease in American workers who were recent graduates of master’s programs.

A significant number of OPT workers stay near their university after graduating, bolstering and filling high-demand positions within the communities that educated them, said Buxton-Walsh, who cataloged the OPT data collected by IFP. In 13 states, over half of all OPT participants who graduated from a university in that state continued to work at least one job in the same state.

“This pipeline is unusually important to some of those smaller, rural communities,” she said.

In an analysis of OPT Observatory data, Chris Glass, professor of the practice in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, argued that the program is not the “Big Tech subsidy,” as some critics claim. In a blog post, he wrote that 2022 data shows that 88 percent of placements were outside the top 100 companies. The median employer of OPT participants, he wrote, hires just three graduates.

“The employer backbone of OPT is real and distributed,” he wrote.

Researchers at the Economic Innovation Group also investigated what jobs OPT workers take, finding that they’re not all positions that Americans would likely occupy. For one, significant numbers of OPT participants work in fields that the federal government has deemed high demand, including artificial intelligence. They also earn more than domestic workers—bucking perceptions that foreign workers accept low pay, which gives them a cost advantage over their American counterparts; just weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance accused companies of replacing American employees with “foreign indentured servants.”

Peak, at EIG, noted that the unemployment rate for STEM graduates has historically been low even while participation in STEM OPT was increasing, indicating that OPT users are not taking jobs. And though many STEM graduates do not work in STEM fields, the researchers noted that that might not necessarily mean they failed to get the job they were seeking.

“It’s kind of a funny example, but Pope Leo—he has a STEM degree, too, and we don’t consider Pope Leo a failure,” said Peak. “We wouldn’t consider somebody who is a computer science major who is doing supply chain management a failure … Americans have more choice to be in these non-STEM roles, and it’s not necessarily evidence of overcrowding or lowering wages.”