US postgraduate student visas will be limited to 4 years

The DHS secretary seems to me to have the point of hosting international students backwards

> This final rule ensures that foreign students remain focused on their primary purpose: completing their studies and returning home.”

Especially at the PhD level, why would educating foreign students and sending them away be the primary motivation for granting visas? Historically it’s been about attracting the best and brightest in the world, training them to be excellent researchers and scholars, and giving them a path to becoming citizens and contributing to growing our economy and technology development and all that. Sending them away after investing in training them for years makes no sense! Especially given the administrations adversarial stance on technology development as a competition between nations more than as an opportunity for collaboration.

I mentor a postdoc who might be affected by this, he’s on a J visa and it’s already been a nightmare of paperwork. He’s really good. Not disputing that there’s some amount of people gaming the student visa system, but this just doesn’t seem well thought out to me :(

Going to make grad school in research-oriented fields rather difficult, as they tend to go longer than 4 years unless everything works the first time or the department isn’t full of 5 semesters of candidate work (courses, cumes, prelim). But unless there’s funding available, nobody will be able to fund a group so I guess it’s a wash.