The Student and Exchange Visitor Program, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, issued guidance to designated school officials on August 12 and August 24, 2026 that applies a stricter test to Curricular Practical Training. Under the tightened standard, CPT must be an integral and required part of the curriculum for all students in a program — not something attached to an elective internship credit or an optional professional-experience course.
Universities responded by pausing rather than risking non-compliance. UC Berkeley suspended applications for Course Credit CPT until further notice while continuing to authorize CPT that is a genuine degree requirement, and indicated it planned to resume CPT tied to master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation research. UC Davis announced a similar suspension of all Course Credit CPT applications on August 19. UCLA, the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois and Boston University have paused or narrowed certain CPT categories while they assess where the new line falls.
The distinction that now matters is between CPT that a degree genuinely requires and CPT that a student elects. A practicum every student in the program must complete to graduate sits comfortably inside the new standard. An internship taken for elective credit — the arrangement many programs built precisely to make summer work authorizable — is the category being suspended. This also puts sustained pressure on “Day 1 CPT” programs, where work authorization begins immediately upon enrollment.
For students, the immediate practical step is to speak with a designated school official before accepting or applying for an internship, rather than after. Authorization that was routine last spring may no longer be available at the same institution this term, and the answer now varies school by school and program by program.
This lands alongside the elimination of Duration of Status on September 15, 2026, which replaces open-ended F-1 admission with fixed periods of up to four years. Taken together, the two changes compress the flexibility that the student-to-H-1B-to-employment-based-green-card path has historically depended on. Students planning eventually to self-petition through the EB-2 National Interest Waiver should be especially careful to keep work authorization unbroken and well documented, since gaps in status create problems that surface years later at the adjustment stage.
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Source: LinkedIn - Kaidi Wu, Ph.D.