Colleges are facing a reckoning over a practice they have long used to hire top researchers and other employees with in-demand skills.
The Trump administration has taken aim at higher ed’s hiring of foreign employees on H-1B visas, as part of a larger crackdown on immigration. Colleges hired over 22,000 such workers in the 2024 fiscal year.
Last month, President Trump announced a new $100,000 fee per H-1B hire for American employers — an attempt to dissuade them from hiring international candidates over citizens. The news sent some universities into “full-blown panic mode” over fears they’d suddenly have to shoulder an added cost of up to eight figures, said Ian Wagreich, who leads the immigration practice at the law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson.
New guidance this month calmed the initial chaos: The fee only applies to potential H-1B employees who are outside the United States. Many of colleges’ H-1B employees are hired from within the country while on a student or other non-immigrant visa.
Still, The Chronicle’s analysis — based on estimates using data from the Department of Homeland Security — shows that some large universities will have to pay millions more per year if they want to continue hiring employees from abroad. For small colleges, even six-figure costs for a few employees could be a major barrier.
The new guidance limiting the fee to only employees coming from abroad is good news for international students, many of whom come to the United States because they hope to eventually transfer to H-1B visas. But this group of students can no longer leave the the country after their studies — to visit home or pursue a research or education opportunity — without subjecting potential future American employers to the fee. Higher education relies heavily on international graduate students for research work, and among postdoctoral researchers in science, engineering, and health fields, 58 percent are temporary visa holders.
Higher-education advocates are speaking out against the fee: Last week, the American Council on Education sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for colleges to be exempt because their H-1B workers are “crucial to the U.S. economy and national security.”
Higher-education institutions have long been exempt from the nationwide 85,000 cap on annual issuances of H-1B visas, and ACE argued that this cap-exempt status should also make higher education fee-exempt.
The fee is also facing legal challenges from groups like the American Association of University Professors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which claim in their respective lawsuits that it’s an overstep of executive power.
“It’s really about what is a continuation in the Trump administration of unilaterally changing systems that were set up by Congress,” said Aaron Nisenson, senior counsel and director of the legal department at the AAUP.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, escalated the right’s movement against H-1B visas on Wednesday. He directed the governing board for public universities in Florida to stop hiring foreign employees altogether. Donald W. Landry, interim president of the University of Florida, endorsed the review of H-1B hiring, adding that he’s been witness to misuse of the visas in academe.
Miriam Feldblum, president and co-founder of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, argued that H-1B visas have long been a critical tool for colleges.
“When I was on campus, the institutions certainly hired international researchers who were educated or trained in the U.S., but were also able to hire economists, scientists, and engineering and other faculty educated and trained abroad,” she said. “That way, we got the best people for the positions.”
For colleges, the potential impacts of the new application fee depend on how many people hired on H-1B visas must travel from abroad. Before the new fee, colleges had to pay between $3,185 to $5,685 per visa application, depending on legal costs.
Stanford University — the top higher-ed employer of people on H-1B visas — had 270 H-1B visa applications approved in the 2024 fiscal year. According to The Chronicle‘s estimate that 125 of these employees came from abroad, continuing the same rate of hiring would cost $11,789,375 more.
“Stanford has a long history of welcoming scholars from around the world who bring unique perspectives to our work, helping us find innovative solutions to the world’s problems,” a university spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Chronicle.
Stanford did not comment on whether it will continue to hire employees through H-1B visas at its current rate. “The decision to move forward depends on the department/school’s needs, budget, and legal review,” the spokesperson wrote.
The new fee might also dissuade international experts from applying for positions in the United States for which they are qualified, if they fear the fee makes them less employable, Feldblum said. A spokesperson for the University of California system expressed a similar concern.
“UC — and other leading research universities — are already seeing a brain drain of talent in high-demand fields who are taking their expertise abroad,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
In the 2024 fiscal year, the University of California at San Francisco, the system’s top employer of H-1B visa holders, filed and got approval for 145 new applications.
Williams College, a small institution of about 2,000 students, has stood out by expressing a commitment to not changing its hiring practices. Last year, the college filed five new H-1B visa applications.
“Our hiring processes for those faculty will remain the same for now,” Lara D. Shore-Sheppard, dean of the faculty, wrote in an email to The Chronicle, noting that Williams remains concerned about the long-term effects of the fee on its ability to recruit international employees.
Questions remain about a separate piece of Trump’s original proclamation: a plan to adjust the minimum-wage levels for H-1B employees, which could be another additional cost for colleges that hire foreign faculty and researchers, Wagreich, the immigration lawyer, said.
Another issue on Feldblum’s mind is where the money from the new fee will go. The government has given no indication.
