They priced the first job and called it upskilling. I know the sentence. It is what a department says when it wants a door closed but would rather be photographed installing a turnstile.
On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, the Associated Press’s Annie Ma and Heather Hollingsworth reported that the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States through Optional Practical Training, the program known as OPT, which lets students work in jobs related to their major during or after school. The bill does not go to the student. Under the proposed rule, schools would pay $70,000 for each new student’s initial application and $30,000 for each renewal. Students are generally eligible for one year of work after graduation; certain science, technology, engineering and math majors can get two more. DHS’s own release, dated the same day, says schools must pay before a designated school official can recommend a student in the federal student database and before the student can apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; that USCIS would not grant work authorization if the school has not paid; that the fee is not tied to any employer; and that the money would be deposited in the Treasury of the United States. The department says it is responding to fraud and abuse found by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, including “problematic worksites” and “pay-to-stay” visa schemes, and that the fees would “encourage schools to exercise greater oversight and selectivity.” Its spokesperson put it more plainly: OPT “was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” and “DHS is upskilling OPT to require foreign students to justify their worth to employers.” Public comments run October 8 through November 9. The AP reports the proposal could face legal challenges, and Doug Rand, a former senior adviser at USCIS under the previous administration, predicted it would be struck down in court, as a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas was; the administration, the AP adds, is now trying a different route to push that H-1B fee past $100,000. Sarah Spreitzer of the American Council on Education said the number of new international students entering the country for the first time fell 17% last fall, the sharpest decrease since the pandemic, and that some colleges are reporting drops of 30% to 40% this fall. Houston immigration lawyer Steven Brown: “I think this is the next level of attack, and I think it’s a design to kill the program without killing the program. I don’t see too many schools wanting to pay $70,000 for a student to get OPT.” Meanwhile, the AP reports, education groups sued on Monday over new ICE guidance narrowing a related program, Curricular Practical Training, and said ICE was threatening college officials with criminal prosecution if they did not comply.
Deb read the number off my laptop and asked whether, for $70,000, the school at least throws in a parking pass. Taryn has opened college accounts for the twins; between them they hold $212 and a coupon for a free car wash, so the twins will be staying local. I love them. They are seasoning.
Upskilling is the alibi. The toll booth is the policy. Sit with the department’s sentence until it confesses: require foreign students to justify their worth to employers. Read it twice. That is not a labor protection. That is a price tag, written by the state, hung on a human being, and paid by a registrar so a résumé can be considered. The department says it is fighting a subsidy for cheap labor, and its remedy is to make the worker cost $70,000 more before he is allowed to be cheap. Notice where the money goes, too: not to the American graduate it claims to protect, not to a wage floor, not to a single inspector of a single “problematic worksite,” but into the Treasury, which is to say into the building. When the state finds a fraud and answers with a fee, it has not caught the fraud; it has franchised it. And the lawyer said the quiet part out loud: a design to kill the program without killing the program. That is the bureau’s favorite trick, the one that never needs a vote. You do not ban the thing. You price it until it dies of natural causes, and the press release calls it integrity. I am not crowning the universities, either; the AP is plain that they recruit abroad as a source of tuition revenue, and a campus that discovers its conscience at the exact dollar figure of its revenue loss is a campus with a budget, not a cause. I am not crowning the tech firms that hire through this program, which will shortly sound like humanitarians. And I am not waiting for a judge to save us, which is the other side’s entire plan. Notice who never gets a line in this story. The department speaks for the American worker, the school speaks for its enrollment, the firm will speak for its pipeline, and the graduate waits in a federal database until somebody pays the toll. I am keeping the cardigan. Fill the notebook. Then ask the department, out loud: if the program is a fraud, why is the cure a cash register?
Sources: Associated Press, Oct. 7, 2026; U.S. Department of Homeland Security release, Oct. 7, 2026; Federal Register public inspection, “Optional Practical Training Fees” (scheduled to publish Oct. 8, 2026).
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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