Vast majority who did OPT now work in US, survey finds

Ongoing research conducted by international education specialists Intead found that out of almost 1,800 respondents who studied in the US from 131 different countries, 64% engaged with OPT or CPT while they were studying – and that the vast majority of them are still in the country.

OPT is a popular avenue for those who are on STEM degrees – some 77% of survey respondents graduated with STEM degrees, and 65% now say they hold STEM-related jobs as well.

Vice of provost and dean of global affairs at UC Davis, Joanna Regulska, who presented the research at NAFSA, noted the importance of such a figure.

“When congress comes and tells us, ‘no more OPT’, you know what we should do, because this is really important for our international students to continue the right skills,” Regulska told delegates, referring to when the Supreme Court dismissed a proposal to ban OPT entirely.

The research, which was conducted by twelve separate institutions in California, Texas, Kansas and Massachusetts, also saw that an international student that has a US degree and lives in the country is 21% more likely to own or rent a home than their domestic student equivalent.

Even with that advantage, though, only 39% of respondents said they intend to continue living or working in the country – 45% say their plans are to leave, either to go home or to go to a different country.

Some 16% said they had plans to pursue further study in the US.

“Thinking about this as a marketing agency that helps institutions recruit international students, this is a ready-made set of students that speak English well, have already studied in the US, are living or working here and are interested in another degree.

“That seems like a pretty nice target cohort to me,” suggested Ben Waxman, CEO of Intead, also presenting the research.

Intead also analyzed two different wage patterns and salaries for certain jobs held by respondents in certain states. In Santa Clara, California, it said, the median salary for a data scientist job that two survey participants have is $205,000.

Slightly lower, in Austin, Texas, is a software developer’s pay – the median salary for five survey participants in that position was $131,000, but no lower than $75,000.

“This median salary falls into the third and fourth bands for Department of Labor minimum wage data sets,” noted Waxman.

He also noted that at the moment, the data pool was smaller with not a lot of people doing the same job, but this was the current state of the data, with a full report expected in the summer of 2024.

The current data also indicates, according to Intead, that international students are indeed contributing to the economy in an active way.

“Like any other worker in the US, they are paying taxes, they are paying for services, for mortgages, cars, for healthcare – and with more data, we can do more of a prevailing wage analysis, more locations or more job sets,” he said, encouraging more universities to get their students to participate in the survey.

Additionally, over half (57%) are working at major corporations in the US like EY, Google and IBM, and 8% are even working at US universities.