By MICHAEL ARNONE
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 6, 2002, Friday

January 30, 2003: The date looms over Catheryn D. Cotten, director of the international office at Duke University, like a storm cloud.

That is when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service expects Duke and every other postsecondary institution in the United States that enrolls foreign students, including vocational institutes, technical schools, and beauty academies -- 74,000 in all, by INS estimates -- to comply with its new, computerized system for tracking international students and professors. Through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis, the INS wants to keep tabs on which applicants colleges accept, the dates on which they enter and leave the United States, and what they are doing while in the country. While the system will also track professors and researchers, its primary focus is on monitoring the activities of foreign students.

Ms. Cotten and her counterparts say they don't oppose the government's measures to ensure that foreign scholars actually come to the United States to study. Their problem is with Sevis itself. What concerns them is how colleges can meet the system's voluminous technical requirements in less than five months' time when the INS has not even completed them yet. The colleges are confused about what compliance means and the penalties they will face if they don't follow the rules.

"Under the current proposed regulations, universities are being asked to meet a deadline that the INS hasn't given them the information or the tools or the time, to meet," says Ms. Cotten, who is widely regarded as a leading expert on Sevis.

College officials say the job would be difficult, but manageable, if they need only to start filing records for new students on Sevis by then. But if colleges must record all of their foreign students on the system by that time, officials fear it would be impossible, because complying with the system will take months and cost thousands of dollars.

Compliance Issues

The announcement by the INS that it will not accept visa documents after January 30 unless they are processed through Sevis has also caused pervasive fear in international-student offices. They worry that such a policy may well force thousands of institutions to shut down those offices until they can comply with the new system.

INS officials insist that the deadline is not as drastic as college officials think. Once the INS approves an institution to join Sevis, agency officials say, the college must file all of its I-20 forms -- visa-eligibility forms that colleges fill out to show that foreign students are qualified to study in the United States -- through the system from that point on.

But the only foreign students whose records the colleges must enter before the January 30 deadline are those who change their status -- for instance, select a new major -- or who enroll in the spring term if it begins after January 30. If the spring semester starts before January 30, the college can wait until the next term, the fall of 2003, to enter its student records into Sevis.

"The bottom line is, the schools have a lot more time to get existing students into the system," says Russell A. Bergeron Jr., a spokesman for the INS.

Communications snafus, though, have kept that reassurance from reaching many colleges. "There is confusion about this issue," acknowledges M. Stella Jarina, the project's leader, who is director of student operations for the immigration-services division of the INS.

Potential Security Risk

The United States has been a mecca for students from around the world for decades, but the risks that some may pose to U.S. security did not become clear until the World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. News that one of the bombers had been living in the country on an expired student visa prompted the first real steps toward tracking international students. In 1996, Congress passed legislation to create the pilot program that would eventually become Sevis.

Technical delays, lack of financial support, political bickering, and institutional inertia at the INS and among colleges, however, kept Sevis on the back burner for years. So the traditional system continued, with colleges filing intermittent reports that rely on trusting the word of foreign students. As a result, many students fell through the cracks, including several of the men involved in the September 11 attacks. The need for more-vigilant scrutiny of student visas became even more glaring when a flight school that two of the hijackers attended received notification from the INS more than six months after the attack that their student visas had been extended.

The USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress last October, injected new urgency and $36.8-million into Sevis. The revitalized system puts responsibility squarely on colleges to report whether their foreign students arrive on campus and are actually taking courses. In addition to making reports as they previously had to when students do something that affects their visa status, like changing their major, colleges now have to update students' files at the beginning of each term. If the INS does not receive an update, the student is considered "out of status" and can face penalties including arrest and deportation.

Sevis will replace a paper-based system in which colleges send carbon copies of forms to a contractor hired by the INS to enter the data by hand. Under Sevis, colleges update a central database themselves, either typing by hand or linking their own computer systems to it. Many college officials agree that once it is up and running, Sevis will be superior to the current way of doing things. The Web-based system will be much faster in giving responses to visa applications than was the old paper-based system, which often took months. It should also decrease the number of forms that colleges must handle, as well as the number of fraudulent visa applications, they say.

Severe Penalties

The USA Patriot Act set the January 30 deadline for colleges to comply with Sevis. Most college officials believe -- correctly, according to INS officials -- that if a college can't make the deadline, it will lose its authorization to issue I-20's and approve other related paperwork until it complies.

At many institutions, that could cripple some academic departments -- like business, engineering, and certain sciences -- that draw half to nearly all of their graduate students from abroad.

College officials say most departments are not yet aware of what effect Sevis could have on them, since the international offices on their campuses are responsible for making sure that the changeover goes smoothly. Once the INS issues final regulations this fall -- the date is uncertain -- it will send out investigative teams to colleges that have not yet signed up to make sure that they do so by January 30.

Most colleges will get nearly automatic approval to use Sevis, college officials say, although it's no rubber stamp. The process takes time -- some colleges signed up in July and are still waiting for approval.

Getting everything done on time will be a challenge because of the government's high expectations for the new system, says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council of Education. "Sevis is a technological moonshot," he says.

No one, he notes, has ever attempted to link so many different entities through one computer system. Sevis will link U.S. consular offices around the world, and INS officials at American ports of entry, with the many thousands of postsecondary institutions in the United States that enroll foreign students.

The breakneck pace at which the INS is developing Sevis is another source of worry for many college officials. Institutions normally need 8 to 12 months to change their computer systems to meet new requirements, and that's only after the new specifications are in place. "Six months for a national system has us concerned," says Murray G. Welsh, director of the international office at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Institutions.

Hopkins is prepared for Sevis and has even helped develop software to assist other colleges, Ms. Welsh says. Still, she wonders, "How is this going to happen by January?"

Indeed, the Justice Department's inspector general released a report on May 20 finding it "unlikely that the INS will be able to meet the January 30, 2003, deadline for full implementation of Sevis."

But with Attorney General John Ashcroft and Congress pushing for immediate solutions, "it's a tough environment to sell patience," says David R. Clubb, director of international services at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rife With Problems

The INS released a version of Sevis on July 1, and so far, 258 institutions are using it. By most accounts, the software is riddled with bugs.

"The chatter in higher education is, Good luck to people who try that,' because we wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole," says Mr. Clubb, who is not yet using Sevis and is waiting until the last minute to sign up.

Among the troubles, two prove most problematic for college officials. For one, Sevis handles only the F-1 and M-1 visas that the INS issues, not the J-1 visas that the U.S. Department of State approves. The F visas are for students; the M visas are for vocational, nondegree students; and the J visas are for visiting research scholars and professors. The State Department is supposed to have its regulations and forms for Sevis ready this fall.

The other primary concern about the system is that until the middle of last month, colleges could complete the forms only by typing the information by hand into the online database. While that works for institutions with few foreign students, most college officials agree that it is impractical for institutions with large international enrollments. A 2001 report from the Institute of International Education found that 81 percent of the 547,867 international students studying in the United States were enrolled at only 449 colleges.

Many institutions would prefer to link their own databases to Sevis, so they can submit "batches" of records at once. Such batch processing is crucial, says Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook, associate dean and director for international students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT has about 2,700 foreign students -- far too many for entering their records by hand, she says.

MIT and other institutions are waiting for the INS to give the new system batch-processing capability -- scheduled for mid-October -- before putting the time and money into entering students one by one.

Even then, racing to meet the deadline could carry risks, says Duke's Ms. Cotten. If the batch-processing program doesn't work correctly, "you can mess up a lot of data really fast," she says.

For example, all men could be listed as women. So colleges may be forced to hire people in a rush to type in student data. And even if all of the information is entered under the deadline, it might be so error-ridden as to be useless. "If you move to push one million files into Sevis by January 30," she says, "you're asking for disaster."

The INS put the technical requirements for batch processing on its Web site last month. But Mr. Bergeron, the INS spokesman, says colleges' focus on batch processing is due in large part to the mistaken belief that all files must be on Sevis by January 30.

Communication Problems

College officials blame many of the problems with Sevis on a lack of information from the INS, particularly in communicating what it is that they need to have ready for January 30. "We need to hear more from Immigration," says Rodolfo R. Altamirano, director of the international center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "We're playing a guessing game here."

Matters were made more confusing last month when the INS eliminated training sessions that were to be held on campuses around the country with representatives of Electronic Data Systems Corporation, which is developing Sevis for the INS. (Company officials referred questions to the agency.) Instead of meeting with experts in person, the INS said colleges needing help would have to call a telephone help line or request a videotape of a training session.

College officials say that by cutting the training program, the INS removed the only face-to-face contact that institutions had with the agency.

"You're not going to get that kind of help from a tape," says Ms. Welsh, of Johns Hopkins. INS officials say they want to put their limited resources into the telephone help desk, which they call a success.

Many colleges are putting together contingency plans to ensure their readiness on January 30. Cornell University, which has more than 4,000 foreign students, might have to "hire an army of people in January to do data entry," says Laura B. Taylor, associate director of Cornell's office of international students and scholars and national coordinator of Sevis preparations for NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Colleges officials also say they are fighting an uphill battle in terms of publicity about their willingness to support Sevis and, by extension, the war on terrorism. They have complained about a $95 fee that the INS wants them to charge foreign students in order to pay for Sevis. Those complaints have earned them a reputation for obstructing national security, Ms. Taylor says. "We want a system that works, but if it appears we're unwilling to cooperate, we're afraid we'll have even more-restrictive legislation imposed on us," she says.

Amid the debate and confusion about Sevis, Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, wonders whether putting so much effort toward Sevis might siphon resources from more-effective security measures.

Only 2 percent of foreigners enter the United States using student visas, he points out. The government demands much more knowledge of students' backgrounds and itineraries before it issues a visa than it asks from the other 98 percent of visitors who enter under other visas.

Often, Mr. Nassirian says, the INS has no idea where tourists go or what they do in the United States.

"We're building a steel door on a rotten wooden frame here," he says.

SEVIS -- A SHORT HISTORY

February 26, 1993:
The World Trade Center is bombed. One of the accused perpetrators is a Palestinian immigrant who had entered the United States as a student at Wichita State University but then dropped out.

September 1996:
In response to the bombing, Congress passes the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which mandates the creation of an electronic reporting and tracking system for international students.

June 1997:
The Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students, or Cipris, a federal task force started in 1995, begins testing a pilot version of its electronic tracking system involving 21 universities in the Southeast. The system tracks all students and certain professors and researchers.

Summer and fall, 2000:
The Student and Exchange Visitor Program is developed from Cipris. The program creates the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis, from the database system used by Cipris.

September 11, 2001:
Terrorists attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Fall 2001:
Congress passes the USA Patriot Act, which reinstates a January 30, 2003, deadline for colleges to get Immigration and Naturalization Service authorization to use Sevis. That date was proposed in 1996 but was abandoned in 2000.

July 1, 2002:
The INS releases Sevis for colleges to use. Colleges complain that the system permits entering information only by hand and does not allow colleges to connect their own databases to Sevis. It also is not capable of processing J-1 visa applications, which most international professors and researchers have. Technical guidelines to help colleges connect their databases to the system become available in August 2002.

Fall 2002:
Final regulations are expected, which will set the date by which colleges must comply with Sevis. The U.S. Department of State is scheduled to release regulations that will enable it to track J-1 visas through Sevis. The INS is scheduled to permit colleges to connect their databases to Sevis.

January 30, 2003:
Current compliance date set for colleges to sign up for Sevis, or face fines and other penalties.