You need to plan on returning to your home country after graduation from a US university.
I don’t know what you have heard about employment opportunities in the US, but US employers are REQUIRED by the government, to seek out domestic candidates for any available positions, FIRST.
Non-citizens may have some internships completed via OPT, but once that time is completed, you are required to return home because your visa will expire.
Employers are showing that they don’t want to deal with the paperwork, nor fees, for sponsorship when there are resident applicants. Plus, the websites of many employers indicate that they are not currently sponsoring non citizens.
You cannot assume that you will be staying in the US after your 4 year education is complete.
The vast majority of students are domestic, so the published numbers are skewed.
And many companies (mine included) won’t hire someone on OPT if they don’t plan to sponsor an H1B for them. For example, our company has a two-year rotational program for new graduates, which is really an extended hands-on training period. Employees start adding meaningful value only after completing the program, so we don’t want to use one of those spots on someone with a three-year OPT if we don’t plan to sponsor their H1B afterward. And, of course, we won’t consider candidates on a one-year OPT.
Also reportedly on the table by the Fed is charging a $100K fee to companies for each OPT spot. I share this to communicate to OP the difficulties of potentially staying in the US after completing one’s bachelors degree. Who knows if this fee will come to fruition, but something to watch as a potential risk.
The Trump administration is considering attaching a $100,000 price tag on international students’ ability to work in the U.S. after they graduate from an American university, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would make it much less attractive for foreigners to study in the U.S.
If enacted, the fee would significantly advance President Trump’s efforts to restrict nearly all forms of legal immigration. It would particularly harm universities, which rely on recruiting international students as a reliable source of revenue, as well as top Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms, which disproportionately hire international college graduates to fill technical roles.
The fee would be attached to a program called optional practical training, or OPT, which allows international university graduates to work for one to three years on their student visas. There were roughly 419,000 foreigners working on OPT in 2024, the latest year that data are available.
The move, in essence, accomplishes the goal originally set out by the administration’s $100,000 levy on H-1B visas for foreign professionals, which caused a panic in Silicon Valley last year. The government was blocked from collecting the H-1B fee by an appeals court in Boston last week.
Hmm. Another report puts that number at under 300k for 2024/25
The number of international students on Optional Practical Training (OPT) reached 294,253 students
And looking at the ICE official report ICE releases 2024 SEVP annual report | ICE it seems that the WSJ has just rolled up the CPT number into overall OPT, which is shoddy reporting because the use and implications are quite different. So that’s under 300k students on OPT (in a year before the restrictions were announced) vs 1.5m international students, 2/3 of which were on one year OPT, and ICE notes there could be duplicates in the data. Bear in mind OPT includes those working after graduate school as well, so the number straight out of undergrad is somewhere lower than that.
I don’t know that you can draw conclusions for any individual graduate but the overall message is clearly still that it’s not going to get easier and likely to get more difficult. So by all means come to the US and get a great education- that will hopefully put you in really good stead in your home country. I know in the country I come from, good foreign degrees are highly prized in the job market.