A new federal rule, set to take effect on Sept. 15, will impose significant restrictions on international students—capping the length of a standard student visa at four years and limiting students’ ability to travel abroad and reenter the country without new authorization.
The changes will impact international students and visiting scholars, and potentially their families, who enter the country under F and J visas. F-1 visas are granted to students enrolled in traditional academic and language programs, while J-1 visas are typically granted to visiting scholars and researchers.
While the rule will not immediately impact current and admitted students for the fall semester, the Harvard International Office (HIO) warned that students who leave the United States after Sept. 15 will be subject to the new requirements.
The rule will take effect in phases, according to DHS, allowing current students to remain in the country through the end of their programs. But multiple international graduate students, many on five or six-year visas, told Harvard Magazine that it remains unclear how their visa timelines would be affected if they left the country and had to reenter under the new rule.
The rule also shifts oversight of student status away from universities. Students—who for decades have been allowed to update their immigration status through their universities—will now need to file for an extension of stay directly with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services if they hope to stay longer than four years.
Since 1979, international students at U.S. institutions have been allowed to remain in the country for the duration of their academic program under a “duration of status” policy. But the new rule, published by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on July 17, will replace this policy with a four-year limit on all F and J visa holders (including their families). This would be especially consequential for Ph.D. students, whose course of study typically lasts more than four years.
Under the new rule, which affects students nationwide, graduate students on F visas will also be prevented from changing their field of study or academic department or transferring to another university without a federal exemption.
The four-year limit has raised concerns about whether international students will be able to complete Harvard’s doctoral programs. The Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) typically funds Ph.D. students for at least five years.
University President Alan Garber ’76 called the four-year cutoff “odd” during an interview with philanthropist David Rubenstein, a former fellow of the Harvard Corporation, at the Economic Club of Washington last week, noting that a typical Ph.D. program takes at least six years to complete. He noted that many of the restrictions under the new rules make it “less and less attractive for international students to come to the United States.”
In the rule, the DHS wrote that it “seeks to address vulnerabilities in the current program, which have resulted in fraud, abuse, and national security threats,” by increasing federal oversight of visa statuses.
Since the “duration of status” policy was introduced in 1979, admissions under the F and J classifications have grown sharply: F-status admissions rose from roughly 260,000 in the year after the policy was implemented to more than 1.8 million in the 2024 fiscal year, while J-status admissions climbed from about 141,000 in 1985 to more than 500,000 in the 2024 fiscal year, according to DHS.
Amid recent restrictive immigration policies and cuts to federal research funding, Garber estimated that the number of international students coming to the U.S. has fallen by roughly 20 percent nationwide—and the impact has been particularly notable among postdoctoral researchers. He argued that the restrictions could make it less appealing for international students to pursue studies in the U.S. as the rules governing their stay grow harder to predict.
“Let there be no mistake about this,” Garber said at the event, “the issue is very often simply uncertainty.”
Garber has also repeatedly warned that other countries—including China and Canada—are making efforts to recruit scientists away from the U.S. In an April interview with the Wall Street Journal, he cited a research-output ranking from the journal Nature in which nine of the world’s top 10 universities are now located outside the United States, many in China.
And last week, Garber reiterated that the same competitive pressures would continue to intensify as international students and researchers grow more uncertain about maintaining a stable career in the U.S.
“Science is truly international, and [other countries] want to ensure that the work continues. And if the work is threatened in the United States, it may be to their advantage,” he said. “But it may also be, in many ways, helpful for the entire world for that work to continue.”
