Federal records: IPEDS, IRS Form 990, State Department, DHS, USCIS
The schools that launder visas
At a growing number of American colleges, foreign students are most of the graduate enrolment. The school takes the tuition. It pays recruiting firms to fill the seats. It issues the paperwork for the student visa, and signs off on the work permits that come with it. Most of these schools also collect federal student aid.
Every step of that is lawful, and nothing on this page says otherwise. A college may enrol whoever it admits. Paying a recruiter is ordinary practice. Issuing an I-20 and recommending OPT is what a school certified by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program is authorised to do, and holding a Title IV agreement is a matter of public record. “Launder” is this site’s word for the pattern these records show. It is not a legal finding, and no school or firm named here is accused of breaking a law.
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How it works, at one school
Trine University is a private nonprofit college in Angola, Indiana. Its main campus reports almost no foreign graduate students. A second record it files with the Department of Education reports almost nothing else.
Graduate students on Trine’s second federal record
IPEDS Fall Enrollment, UNITID 414878, “Trine University-Regional/Non-Traditional Campuses”.
What Trine reported paying recruiting firms
IRS Form 990, EIN 35-0715530, fiscal years ending 30 April. Services as filed: “RECRUITMENT”.
Every school where foreign students are the majority
Institutions with at least 100 graduate students where non-residents are half or more of them, fall 2024. Federal aid is what the school took in for its eligible students in 2022–23; foreign students cannot receive it. Recruiting payments are what nonprofits reported on their own tax returns.
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“Federal aid” is undergraduate Pell grants plus federal student loans, paid to the school and credited against tuition and fees; IPEDS does not report graduate federal loans, so it understates what graduate-heavy schools take in. A dash under recruiting means no 990 was found or no recruiting firm was among the contractors the school had to list; “parent filer” means the return covers a larger university and cannot be attributed to this campus.
The student route is now bigger than the work visa
A graduate working on OPT or the STEM extension needs no new visa, no consular appointment and no employer petition. It is work authorisation on an F-1 already issued. Set that against H-1B visas issued at a consulate, and the two have changed places.
The chart below indexes each series to 2015, with the dated federal actions marked.
Every federal action in this series, with its primary source
The figures behind the charts
Why an OPT hire costs an employer less
TN is a different path, and the data hides it
Method and limits
- Enrolment is IPEDS Fall Enrollment part A: all graduate students (EFALEVEL 12, LSTUDY 3), non-residents from EFNRALT. Schools with fewer than 100 graduate students are left out, because a handful of students can swing their share.
- “Takes part in federal student aid” means the school holds a Title IV Program Participation Agreement (IPEDS directory, OPEFLAG = 1).
- Pell grants and federal loans are paid to the institution and applied to students’ tuition and fees first. Non-resident aliens are not eligible for either, so the dollars were awarded to the school’s eligible students.
- Recruiting payments are as filed on each nonprofit’s IRS Form 990: the independent contractors paid more than $100,000 whose services are recruitment, and expense lines that name recruitment. For-profit schools and public universities do not file a 990.
- Visa issuances are counts of visas, not people: a visa is re-stamped for travel.
Built by scripts/build_visa_schools.py and
scripts/build_visa_substitution.py. Data: visa_schools.json,
visa_substitution.json.