Bloomberg Investigates the ‘Elaborate Charade’ Known as Day 1 CPT

The opening paragraphs of a new Bloomberg article on ICE’s controversial “Day 1 CPT” (Curricular Practical Training) practice are quite eye-opening:

At 1 p.m. on certain Saturday afternoons, hundreds of foreign-born professionals from all over the US converge on a small city in central Pennsylvania. They assemble in a high-rise office building, where they sit through four hours of college classes. Then they return to the airport and head home.

What’s drawing these students to Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is not the prospect of landing a good job. A majority already have one. Nor is it the prestige of a Harrisburg degree. If they’re lucky, they won’t ever graduate.

Instead, for most, it’s an elaborate charade to stay in the country legally.

Bloomberg accurately describes this practice — which is occurring without any apparent pushback from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — as one that operates “essentially, as a two-year work visa in disguise” that assists foreign nationals by “exploiting a federal on-the-job-training rule” that allows people from India, China, and elsewhere to “work full time while completing most classes online and showing up in person only a few times a year”.

This practice has raised alarms within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) foreign student division, called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). Its leadership knows that the Curricular Practical Training program has developed into something that was never really intended by the federal agencies tasked with running the foreign student program. The phrase “Day 1 CPT” is not contained within regulations and the SEVP website doesn’t really provide any guidance on the issue. As Bloomberg puts it, the practice operates “in a legal gray area, tolerated but not explicitly authorized by the Department of Homeland Security”.

Day 1 CPT operates “essentially, as a two-year work visa in disguise” that allows aliens to “work full time while completing most classes online and showing up in person only a few times a year”.

There are currently 140,829 foreign students who have obtained work authorization through the CPT program. CPT allows foreign students to receive training related directly to the student’s major area of study if that training is “an integral part of the school’s established curriculum”. Such employment might be rational where graduation requires practical, hands-on training at a job site (e.g., some medical degrees). One could imagine a nursing student, for example, taking all of the knowledge she’s received from two years in school and applying it in the real world during the final semester of classes.

So-called “Day 1 CPT”, however, is employment that begins as soon as the foreign student arrives in the United States. Generally, the students show up to campus for an orientation, and then take off to whatever job they have obtained, even if the jobsite is in an entirely different state. Whether these foreign nationals should count as “students” at all is a serious question. Jerry Jackson, the vice president for enrollment and communications at the University of Cumberlands — a school that has built its business model around Day 1 CPT and risen quickly to become one of the most popular schools in the nation amongst foreign students — explained, “One weekend every term they show up on one of these campuses to study, and they get enough face-to-face time in the United States on an F-1 student visa”, as reported by Quartz.

How many foreign students are involved in “Day 1” CPT has not been reported by DHS. Bloomberg estimates that “24,000 foreign graduate students were enrolled in schools offering Day 1 CPT” as of Fall 2022. This estimate does not include undergraduate students.

Though the practice of Day 1 CPT may be in a gray area of law, and the total numbers unclear, SEVP “declined to answer a series of written questions from Bloomberg about Day 1 CPT”.

Opposition to transparency on immigration issues has been a hallmark of the Biden administration, and the public should be very concerned that a powerful office within ICE is unwilling to answer basic questions about their own program. Of course, this office is also ignoring multiple requests from Congress about the Jordanian foreign student who attempted to breach Marine Corps Base Quantico a few months back. About half a dozen congressional inquiries remain unanswered, and we don’t even know what school enrolled this individual.

Since SEVP won’t provide Bloomberg a quote, I’ll provide a quote from the head of SEVP. When I was working at ICE, the head of SEVP said to me, in a serious tone, “we really need to do something about Day 1 CPT” — it was a straightforward acknowledgement that the practice has developed outside of DHS’s control and threatens the legitimacy of the foreign student program and national security. The fix that ICE was working on under the Trump administration was focused on practical training as a whole — to include Optional Practical Training and the STEM version — and likely would have effectively ended the practice of Day 1 CPT.

Bloomberg spoke with Steven Brown, an immigration lawyer with Reddy Neumann Brown PC in Houston, who raised an issue central to all of these “practical training” programs:

On a student visa, “you are supposed to be a student, not a worker,” Brown said. “When you have this handful of schools that are gearing their curriculum around work rather than study is where it kind of gives me some pause.”

Bloomberg explains the situation quite well here:

For schools and students alike, success requires a bit of misdirection. To qualify for CPT under federal rules, schools must maintain that jobs are an “integral” part of the coursework — even though the students’ jobs are all different and some don’t have one at all. And students, if they’re ever asked, must assure immigration authorities that they sought the degree primarily for educational reasons.

Bloomberg found some very interesting data that indicate the students are not really interested in an education at all, noting that “more than half dropped out after winning the H-1B visa lottery, according to a 2017 financial disclosure” and that “fewer than one in three hung around through graduation”. In other words, CPT and the institutions that promote it are nothing more than an address for foreign nationals to hang out until they can obtain an immigration benefit or a foreign worker visa.

A school administrator for Harrisburg revealed some very troubling issues that should have immediately resulted in SEVP revoking the school’s ability to enroll foreign students:

Susan Wayman, a veteran college administrator, joined Harrisburg in 2020 to run the office. She started noticing compliance problems everywhere, she said. Most were pretty technical: a degree program that wasn’t registered with DHS; students who’d started classes before their DHS files were in order; no policy to handle students who wanted to enroll without having a job. … When Wayman brought the problems to [Eric Darr, then the interim college president] and other administrators, she said they seemed more concerned about tuition dollars than compliance. “This is a leadership that did not care about the regulations,” Wayman said. “They wanted to make it as easy as possible for students to come and be enrolled.” Wayman said she began looking for another job almost immediately and quit after less than a year.

What has SEVP done about any of this? Apparently nothing. Leadership running Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which oversees SEVP, should be working on a fix. When SEVP allows national security threats to percolate, bad things have an increased chance of occurring. And when something bad does happen, more than likely it’s going to be HSI that’s pulled before a congressional committee.

The issues have apparently continued and Harrisburg staff have been reporting it to their school’s leadership, without resolution, raising the question of what SEVP is doing, if anything:

Friction between the university leadership and the international student office continued. It reached a new pitch last year, when staffers reported a litany of problems to federal officials, including the SEVP representative who oversees the school’s student visa program, emails and other documents reviewed by Bloomberg News show. The staffers complained they were routinely asked by higher-ups to stretch rules to boost enrollment. “I have witnessed numerous violations” of student-visa regulations, one employee wrote. “Whenever this has been brought up to leadership, my job has been threatened.”

ICE’s regulations require very specific record-keeping by schools that have been certified by SEVP to enroll foreign students, and failure to adhere to the rules is supposed to result in the school losing its certification. In other words, the school will not be able to enroll any more foreign students. The rationale behind all of this is that SEVP is tasked with keeping track of all foreign students through one of the most significant post-9/11 databases called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). This is a challenging undertaking in the best of circumstances, which is why SEVP should be making sure the schools it has certified are in strict compliance with the law. National security depends on it. Yet Bloomberg writes:

Before 2023, the staffers said in emails to federal authorities, Harrisburg didn’t have reliable records showing if students had met in-person attendance requirements, even though it was routinely telling immigration officials that it did.

In May of last year, Harrisburg fired one of the office’s five employees, according to people with knowledge of the events. Three others quit later the same week, in part because they believed their colleague had been fired for resisting pressure to bend a rule, the people said. (The alleged issue was one Wayman had flagged — allowing students to start classes before their official DHS records were transferred from their previous school.) The people requested anonymity because they said they feared retaliation from the university.

Contacted by Bloomberg, the SEVP official referred questions to the DHS press office, which declined to comment on the matter.

In its defense, Harrisburg University told Bloomberg that it didn’t violate SEVP rules or pressure anyone to do so. Seeing no push-back from SEVP, other institutions are popping up to profit off of this controversial practice. Bloomberg highlights one called Trine University, a private institution in Indiana, which has opened satellite locations in Michigan, Virginia, and Arizona and has become “a top Day 1 CPT player over the past three years”. It requires hardly any attendance by students — as little as one in-person visit per semester, a total of two per year.

Bloomberg notes that “federal rules governing student visas don’t set a minimum number of in-person visits”, which is technically true, but the regulations do require that students are “pursuing a full course of study” or “engaging in authorized practical training following completion of studies”. At the same time, “an alien who has been granted employment authorization pursuant to the terms of a document issued by [DHS] shall be deemed to be engaged in a ‘full course of study’ if he or she remains registered for no less than the number of semester or quarter hours of instruction per academic term specified by the [DHS Secretary] in the notice for the validity period of such employment authorization”. Yes, it would be helpful for SEVP to provide Bloomberg a quote deciphering all this.

The regulation doesn’t provide a lot of detail on how CPT is supposed to operate, but explains:

An F-1 student may be authorized by the [Designated School Official] to participate in a curricular practical training program that is an integral part of an established curriculum. Curricular practical training is defined to be alternative work/study, internship, cooperative education, or any other type of required internship or practicum that is offered by sponsoring employers through cooperative agreements with the school.

I’m of the opinion that DHS never contemplated that there would be schools that operate almost entirely for the purpose of assisting foreigners in obtaining work authorization without any interest in providing an actual education. Yet SEVP has done nothing to rein this practice in. But either SEVP or Congress will need to step in if our foreign student program is going to retain any legitimacy. As it is, Harrisburg University is already working on a plan to reduce its required number of in-person sessions from nine per year to only six, according to Bloomberg.

Congress intended that our foreign student program operate to provide foreigners an education and cultural experience in the United States that they can bring back with them to the home country upon graduation. Without some immediate changes, the foreign student program is going to quickly turn into a foreign worker program — if it hasn’t already. If foreign students aren’t here to receive an education and return to the homeland, then there’s really no point in maintaining the foreign student program at all.

How to Fix This. There are many ways DHS or Congress could prevent this exploitation of the foreign student program from continuing. It arguably wouldn’t require any mention of Day 1 CPT at all. The fact is that DHS does not mention the practice anywhere in the regulations, and it’s not actually a program. In fact, the reason SEVP likely didn’t give Bloomberg a quote on Day 1 CPT is because the office didn’t want to be seen as giving the practice any legitimacy. As such, SEVP could simply amend the regulation to require foreign students attend class at least three days a week, in person, at the campus that enrolled them. It could allow CPT only where it is required of all students as a condition of graduating. It could limit the types of degrees that qualify for CPT. There are plenty of other options, but Congress likely has to compel SEVP to make an adjustment as soon as practicable.