A Degree Against the Clock: Reed Prepares for the Possible End of Duration of Status Rule
Last Monday, a federal judge blocked a sweeping change to the immigration status of international students and scholars, one day before it was scheduled to take effect. However, the possibility still looms for this change to impact Reed. This past week, International Student Services (ISS) held information sessions and began preparing in case fixed periods of admission into the country eventually take effect.
For nearly half a century, most international students in the United States have not been given a fixed date by which they must leave. Instead, they are admitted for “duration of status,” or D/S: they may generally remain as long as they stay enrolled, maintain valid documents, and follow the rules governing their immigration status. If completing a degree takes longer than expected, the college can update the student’s program end date without requiring a separate application to the federal government.
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule scheduled to take effect on September 15 would have fundamentally changed that arrangement. International students and visiting scholars would instead receive a fixed “admit until” date, generally no later than four years after entry. Anyone needing additional time would have to apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for an extension, or leave the country and seek a new period of admission upon reentry. Under the rule, an extension could be denied at the discretion of an immigration officer without an administrative appeal. As District Judge F. Dennis Saylor later put it, a student one credit short of graduating could be required to leave without completing their degree.
At Reed, Saylor’s hypothetical student is not so hypothetical. In an August 18 court declaration, the college reported that approximately 114 undergraduates hold F-1 status and that 25% of them take longer than four years to graduate. Based on previous patterns, Reed estimated that at least 40 current students could need federal extensions to finish their degrees under the new system. The college emphasized that taking more than four years to graduate "is not a sign of failure or fraud." However, under the fixed-date system, an officer could deny an application, or a student could lose status because an application was late or deemed technically deficient. Processing delays could leave students unsure whether they would be permitted to finish an education in which they had already invested years.
Reed’s declaration also describes an institutional burden beyond the additional paperwork for students. Reed's ISS office consists of two full-time professionals and was trained around D/S. If the change were to go into effect, the college anticipates they would file approximately 38 extension applications each year, requiring 135 hours of staff training and several thousand dollars in legal consultation. Students could also face filing fees, travel for biometric appointments, or the cost and risk of leaving the country to seek readmission.
Fortunately, these consequences did not arrive on September 15. On September 14, one day before the scheduled implementation of the fixed-date system, Saylor issued a nationwide preliminary injunction, concluding that the higher education and labor organizations challenging the rule were likely to succeed. The order preserves D/S while the lawsuit is in progress.
For now, Reed’s international students remain under the existing system, but the possibility of a fixed-date system has already prompted preparation. At information sessions on September 17 and 22, ISS advised students to retrieve and check their I-94 records, review the program end dates on their I-20s or DS-2019s, keep their passports valid, and monitor future updates. Reed has also begun calculating what implementation of the new system would require from its two-person ISS office.
Saylor’s 48-page opinion is, by the standards of legal writing, remarkably close to a roast. DHS defended the four-year cap partly on national security grounds, pointing to several Chinese students who had attempted to photograph military facilities. Saylor called that justification “border[ing] on the absurd.” He reasoned, bluntly, that aspiring spies are not known for patiently waiting until year five. Someone planning to photograph a military base could presumably do so before completing four years of college, or skip college altogether and enter on a six-month tourist visa. Another example involved a Russian intelligence operative who entered using a fraudulent identity; inconveniently for DHS’s theory, he had been in the country for only two years.
Furthermore, DHS presented the existence of people who had spent more than ten years in student status as evidence D/S being abused. But Saylor responded that there is “nothing inherently suspect” about an education lasting ten years, especially “at the highest levels.”
The point beneath the judicial side-eye was that none of these examples explained what becomes particularly dangerous after the four-year span, how a four-year deadline would prevent conduct that had already occurred well before it, or why a handful of national security anecdotes can justify remaking the entire system. The government’s rationales, Saylor concluded, were “exceptionally weak,” and their connection to the rule was “exceptionally attenuated.”
Over the past two years, the Trump administration has used several forms of authority to influence decisions that universities once largely governed internally. The administration has already suspended or threatened federal grants and contracts while demanding changes to universities’ diversity programs, admissions policies, campus governance, and responses to student protest. This strategy has been most visible at major research universities, whose laboratories and academic programs depend heavily on federal funding. However, a recently proposed Treasury Department rule could extend similar pressure to a much wider range of private colleges. Under the proposal, schools that provide certain benefits on the basis of race (e.g. for granting admissions, scholarships, facilities, or other programs) could lose their federal tax-exempt status.
The rule remains subject to public comment and would not take effect before May 2027, but because nonprofit status affects institutional donations and financing, even the possibility of revocation may encourage colleges to reconsider programs before enforcement begins. As a private nonprofit college, Reed belongs to the broad category of institutions that could be affected, although it is not yet clear whether any specific Reed program would conflict with the final regulation.
The proposed end of the duration-of-status rule is one of several recent efforts to reshape higher education through institutions’ dependence on the federal government. These actions each turn the operations essential to a college—funding, nonprofit status, and now, the ability for their students to lawfully remain in the country—into a source of leverage. For now, D/S remains in place, but Reed is already preparing for a system in which international students’ ability to stay in college longer than four years would be in jeopardy.