Is this headline misleading? From reading the article, Berkeley is pausing authorizations for Course Credit CPT, which enables international students on visa’s to work in exchange for credits to complete their degree program. It doesn’t outright ban work experience if it is an “integral part of an established curriculum”.
The headline reads like Berkeley is suspending authorization of international students workers in general, but this actually seems like a relatively narrow restriction?
The new directive requires that the course requires the internship. Most programs (especially CS/economics etc) dont. This effectively removed any pathway for international cs students interning. It’s far from a narrow restriction
That is not true. It does not restrict anyone from applying for OPT and pursue one or more internships. Given your other comment, it is pretty obvious you are not super familiar with the details of CPT vs OPT.
> That is not true. It does not restrict anyone from applying for OPT and pursue one or more internships. Given your other comment, it is pretty obvious you are not super familiar with the details of CPT vs OPT.
May be obvious to you. I don't know, but to be clear, nothing new is "banned" here. The schools are now more carefully following the existing published guidelines, rather than playing fast and loose with work authorizations like Oprah. Dropping OPT would be a rule change; this one isn't.
We wouldn’t want someone to work in the US under the guise of a student visa, after all. It’s not like the current richest man in the world didn’t start his journey that way.
Funnily enough if you go to community college in California, you can do something called the Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG) that guarantees you admission into any UC except for LA and Berkeley. The UC system is required to increase the amount of in-state low-income students they accept due to agreements with the state and programs like these are crucial to that.
TAG is usually quite simple to qualify for. You just need 30 semester credits and to maintain a GPA ranging from 2.0 to 3.5 depending on the program you're applying for.
How is this related to being "welcome" or not?
Of course they are very welcome to study. They are simply not encouraged to circumvent their program of study and go to work under the guise of "CPT."
How is using CPT for a summer internship circumventing program pf study? To get CPT, the experience has to related to your degree, not just a random job. And you can only do it in over school breaks
Reading the article it explicitly says if CPT is designed as part of your program of study that you need to complete to satisfy the degree requirements, they are fine. They just won't approve it for optional internships. That's what Optional Practical Training is explicitly intended for, Optional.
And no, to be clear, you are totally mistaken about "school break" thing. In fact, you have to be enrolled in credits to get CPT, not on a full break (this is in no way a new rule.)
I ask because I did not use the term "abuse," as that's subjective. Circumvent was picked precisely because it was a clear run around the intent of the program, without the value judgement.
The keyword is "Day 1 CPT" if you want to learn about the abuse.
Certain colleges basically knowingly wink wink and allow incoming students to go immediately work under CPT.
> I'm pretty sure that the kids getting admitted to Berkeley actually are the best and the brightest.
Are they?
* UC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far. [1] [2] [3] [4]
* "I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math" [1] [2] [3] [4]
* Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's [5]
* Star California student rejected by 16 colleges, hired by Google, gets legal win in racial discrimination suit [6]
Seems like the best and the brightest are being rejected and suing over it, with receipts...
University objectives of making a diverse student body (an objective I basically agree with!) make this tricky and futzy (but not impossible IMO! You can always do something a bit hybrid), but I really feel like if some US university just decided to go to an entrance exam model they'd probably instantly have a cohort of students that would be _much_ easier to onboard into university materials.
Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.
Every argument against standardized testing in this kind of thing seems to boil down to "test results are heavily correlated to socio-economic status". But... every other form of university entrance criteria process is even more correlated, right? All those extracurriculars aren't free after all.
> Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.
Yeah I did the French engineering school exams, I got a looooot of nasty grades in some of the test banks.
I was in the American school system up until HS and then moved to France. The _way_ stricter grading compared to what I had in the US was very hard to get used to.
One thing that I did witness while studying for the engineering school exams (which is a whole two year affair) was seeing a lot of people who were very used to being the top of their class and getting good grades flame out, because they had already been working super hard in high school to keep their grades up.
I think there's a good chunk of "straight A students" who might struggle with the hit to their ego in that environment. But it was helpful and humbling to me.
It also really opens your eyes to the reaches of what you learn can achieve when applied intelligently. My favorite class in university, by far, was an astronomy/astrophysics type class. I think I scored around a 60%, which ended up being a 4.0 for the class. It was just brutal, but seeing what was at least possible to achieve from what we were learning was also amazing.
Speaking as a teacher it's highly unfortunate that at most schools this doesn't really fly - even with curving, because parents and kids alike expect 100% for basic understanding and application. So it's the analog of understanding akin to an assembly line worker instead of an engineer. This is especially a shame in the era of LLMs when rote regurgitation is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and higher order 'understanding' is becoming much more relevant.
Always been much more an application than theory guy, but we all have to adapt to technology and this is where it's at now.
The sooner Cal cleans its act up, the better. College admissions IS zero-sum and it's absolutely harmful for the students rejected and those enrolled to accept unqualified candidates.
Concerning [5], the article says he was rejected at UC Santa Barbara. Haven't checked in a while, but I believe UCSB historically accepts 40-50% of first time applicants. The schools were not using SAT scores at the time, and UC has banned race considerations in admissions for nearly 30 years. Surely there's more to this story.
With enough researcher degrees of freedom, you can make the data appear to support almost any reasonable story, sure. But that's not what's going on here - unless you have a pointed issue with the methodology, which if so, please state.
My guess is that you're just repeating something to dismiss something you agree with, and misunderstand the quote you're using.
Coincidentally, I just checked law school rankings in CA. In my day (mid 90's), Boalt Hall was at the very top, and most kids were told don't even bother trying for it. Now it's not in the top 15 in the nation and latest USNR has it third in CA behind Stanford and UCLA.
Stanford has been top three in the US for at least twenty years (the other two are Yale and Harvard), and UCLA hovered in 14–16 range for twenty years as well. The past few years, the rankings went haywire. I think their methodology changed, bc there isn't a law firm in the world that would hire a Chicago student over a Harvard student, ceteris paribus.
Boalt has kind of been the butt of a lot of jokes since I was a student decades ago. Maybe those jokes came to fruition. (A bit like Brown among the Ivies.)
“Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school,” wrote Zvezdelina Stankova, of UC Berkeley, in an op-ed piece on Saturday for the San Francisco Standard.
Stankova — who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria — described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”
> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's
How does that relate to Berkeley?
> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's
What's the point here? Whatever happened with that person, there are many more Berkeley applicants who have exceptional records.
(There must be more to the story - neither citation says why he was rejected. To the degree there is discrimination, I expect it would be against borderline applicants and not exceptional ones.)
36% of international students. International students are the biggest source of profit for the UC's. They pay much much more than in-state and (in-nation?) students. UC Irvine is the most infamous of the UC's for prioritizing international students for the profit motive.
Not that I'm against international students. But I think it's misleading to parade them around to show how "diverse" your student body is. The truth is that these international students are almost all the upper crust of the various countries they come from. Not much diversity in "rich kids" around the world.
When I did my CPT more than a decade ago in an age before the current admissions policies, I had to ensure that the place I was going to work at was a good fit for what I was studying, and there needed to be a written explanation of why it would directly benefit my studies. And it was no joke, I couldn't do an internship for a role not directly in my field of study.
Either Berkeley isn't doing things right, or this is a shakedown. International students are the biggest money-spinners for universities (to the detriment of everything else at this point, from what I hear), and ICE is going for the jugular.
So, this is not about OPT, but CPT. Many from various schools have abused CPT; so, they want to put to close that loophole. Some real ones get affected by this because of others' actions.
> They just need to return to India after graduation.
> If they wish to immigrate to America, there are different visa pathways for that.
The CPT program is about working during a course of study, before graduation, and isn't an immigration program, so what is the relevance of your comment?
> The CPT program is about working during a course of study, before graduation, and isn't an immigration program, so what is the relevance of your comment?
The whole reason Indians are in this mess is because they commit fraud to obtain internships at fake companies to obtain H1B, and have a baby ASAP to maximize chance for a green card.
If you want to improve the lives of overseas Indians, perhaps you should first acknowledge the problem.
Until then, better start looking at the UAE Golden Visa.
But I heard even that is becoming stricter in late-2026. Time is ticking.
SO..you are saying the admin is acting because this country abused benefits. And you are not blaming the admin for stopping OPT from said country but everyone else. Do you see the problem?
are you indian or paki? muslim? any of those? you know people are tired of you also? you literally have a reputation of smelling, and have a selfish, dirty culture - do you see how that works?
Have you actually talked to people from other places about racism?
People in the Middle East and the far east and Africa are maaaassively more racist than the euro diaspora is today. How are you surprised that an Iranian is racist against Indians or whatever, that’s absolutely typical for that part of the world.
Maybe its about the same admin that is killing Americans in the name of immigration and trying to get rid of the same pathway that same admin took to bring a whole family over[0] -- they just didnt want to get political so avoided naming them
why even bother with this "you know what I mean" stuff? if you're going to say things like this have the conviction to say it straight. you come off as a bigot AND a coward this way.
The headline reads like Berkeley is suspending authorization of international students workers in general, but this actually seems like a relatively narrow restriction?
It's obvious that OPT will be banned next.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/elon-musk-immigration-wash...
I'm pretty sure that the kids getting admitted to Berkeley actually are the best and the brightest. we should absolutely be welcoming them.
what are we even doing here?
TAG is usually quite simple to qualify for. You just need 30 semester credits and to maintain a GPA ranging from 2.0 to 3.5 depending on the program you're applying for.
And no, to be clear, you are totally mistaken about "school break" thing. In fact, you have to be enrolled in credits to get CPT, not on a full break (this is in no way a new rule.)
This implies that you are familiar with the system and aware of how it's abused, so presumably you can provide some evidence.
I wasn't aware of any during my time there, but my personal experience doesn't necessarily mean it didn't/hasn't happened.
The keyword is "Day 1 CPT" if you want to learn about the abuse.
Certain colleges basically knowingly wink wink and allow incoming students to go immediately work under CPT.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/elon-musk-immigration-wash...
Are they?
* UC-Berkeley math prof says she has to teach fractions to calculus students because standards have fallen so far. [1] [2] [3] [4]
* "I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math" [1] [2] [3] [4]
* Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's [5]
* Star California student rejected by 16 colleges, hired by Google, gets legal win in racial discrimination suit [6]
Seems like the best and the brightest are being rejected and suing over it, with receipts...
[1] https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/us-news/uc-berkeley-math-prof-...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-27/uc-math-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizdoestone/2026/08/24/when-str...
[4] https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/08/15/uc-berkeley-sat-te...
[5] https://abc7news.com/post/stanley-zhong-college-rejected-tee...
[6] https://nypost.com/2026/08/30/us-news/california-student-sta...
Biggest problem is you'd need to make the entrance exams _actually tough_. Like "basically nobody who takes it gets an A". The objective is to rank students between each other, after all! It doesn't matter if the top scorer only has a 70% or something.
Every argument against standardized testing in this kind of thing seems to boil down to "test results are heavily correlated to socio-economic status". But... every other form of university entrance criteria process is even more correlated, right? All those extracurriculars aren't free after all.
Plenty of other countries already do it this way
I was in the American school system up until HS and then moved to France. The _way_ stricter grading compared to what I had in the US was very hard to get used to.
One thing that I did witness while studying for the engineering school exams (which is a whole two year affair) was seeing a lot of people who were very used to being the top of their class and getting good grades flame out, because they had already been working super hard in high school to keep their grades up.
I think there's a good chunk of "straight A students" who might struggle with the hit to their ego in that environment. But it was helpful and humbling to me.
Speaking as a teacher it's highly unfortunate that at most schools this doesn't really fly - even with curving, because parents and kids alike expect 100% for basic understanding and application. So it's the analog of understanding akin to an assembly line worker instead of an engineer. This is especially a shame in the era of LLMs when rote regurgitation is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and higher order 'understanding' is becoming much more relevant.
Always been much more an application than theory guy, but we all have to adapt to technology and this is where it's at now.
Another big issue is that many of these under-prepared students came from the same Bay Area 'under-represented' feeder schools: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2026/uc-acceptance-rate...
The sooner Cal cleans its act up, the better. College admissions IS zero-sum and it's absolutely harmful for the students rejected and those enrolled to accept unqualified candidates.
My guess is that you're just repeating something to dismiss something you agree with, and misunderstand the quote you're using.
Boalt has kind of been the butt of a lot of jokes since I was a student decades ago. Maybe those jokes came to fruition. (A bit like Brown among the Ivies.)
Stankova — who rose through the mathematics world to earn a PhD from Harvard after being born in communist Bulgaria — described the admissions process as “less like careful evaluation and more like chance.”
> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's
How does that relate to Berkeley?
> Bay Area high school grad rejected by 16 colleges hired by Google -- Zhong had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT's
What's the point here? Whatever happened with that person, there are many more Berkeley applicants who have exceptional records.
(There must be more to the story - neither citation says why he was rejected. To the degree there is discrimination, I expect it would be against borderline applicants and not exceptional ones.)
https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files...
Not that I'm against international students. But I think it's misleading to parade them around to show how "diverse" your student body is. The truth is that these international students are almost all the upper crust of the various countries they come from. Not much diversity in "rich kids" around the world.
They mostly are loyal to the USA and that's why they come here.
It's colossally stupid to spit in their faces like this.
Either Berkeley isn't doing things right, or this is a shakedown. International students are the biggest money-spinners for universities (to the detriment of everything else at this point, from what I hear), and ICE is going for the jugular.
That is exactly the problem.
Stanford University owns 7 private jets for “administrative use”. The fuck?
Perhaps cut the free money from international students, then universities can finally focus on producing research, or god forbid, educating students.
Tell that to immigrants being cruel to other immigrants, even in America.
Couple of countries people are famous for this.
Why?
International students are still allowed to study in America.
They just need to return to India after graduation.
If they wish to immigrate to America, there are different visa pathways for that.
It prevents international students from internships at companies while still enrolled in university.
Unless you have a different definition of the word “student visa”?
Perhaps you meant “F-1 green card” visa?
> They just need to return to India after graduation.
> If they wish to immigrate to America, there are different visa pathways for that.
The CPT program is about working during a course of study, before graduation, and isn't an immigration program, so what is the relevance of your comment?
The whole reason Indians are in this mess is because they commit fraud to obtain internships at fake companies to obtain H1B, and have a baby ASAP to maximize chance for a green card.
If you want to improve the lives of overseas Indians, perhaps you should first acknowledge the problem.
Until then, better start looking at the UAE Golden Visa.
But I heard even that is becoming stricter in late-2026. Time is ticking.
How do you think it is being misrepresented?
The only people who agree with his rant would also love to see him forcibly deported to CECOT.
Just another bigoted dipshit who thinks he's part of the in-group, even though he very, very much is not.
Bro, the people who agree with your take also think you should be kicked the fuck out.
People in the Middle East and the far east and Africa are maaaassively more racist than the euro diaspora is today. How are you surprised that an Iranian is racist against Indians or whatever, that’s absolutely typical for that part of the world.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318