Foreign Student Database Debuts

After nearly a decade of delays and glitches, a nationwide database of all international students at universities and trade schools across the country became officially operational on Saturday.

Although the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) has been in the works since the mid-1990s,

the registration program became a major national priority after federal investigators discovered that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists had entered the country on student visas.

The Saturday deadline was an extension from an initial deadline in January.

The penalty for not complying with the SEVIS system is steep—a suspension of a school’s ability to enroll international students—and over the past several months, many have expressed fear that the long-troubled system would be a disaster.

Officials with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and with universities nationwide have been working at a frenzied pace to make SEVIS work, but it’s too soon to tell whether the system will be fully successful.

Most schools across the country are now in the process of registering all their new second-semester students with SEVIS, which is run by the INS, as a prelude to a major registration rush that will crescendo over the summer as schools load up all of their international students.

Because Harvard’s second semester began just before the registration deadline, the University has an extension until August.

Harvard officials say they’re planning to do everything necessary comply with the demands of the new system, including hiring temporary workers for data-entry and restructuring their database of international students to make the transition easier.

Harvard has worked diligently to meet SEVIS deadlines from the beginning, according to Sharon Ladd, director of the Harvard International Office (HIO).

And the University expects to overleap hurdles that SEVIS may cast in its path over the coming months, Ladd says.

“We’re ready,” she says. “The University will be compliant.”

Harvard received INS approval to use the database on the afternoon of Jan. 30, meeting the first registration deadline. Since then, it has been required to enter information from any visa applications that pass through its office in the SEVIS database.

A Sea Change

Unlike the former system of information gathering, through which U.S. schools would send information about its international students to the INS for entry by hand, SEVIS establishes a single, nationwide database and requires institutions to update it themselves.

This new database is the result of congressional concerns about poor information on international students following the discovery that several of the Sept. 11 hijackers had entered the country on student visas. One hijacker, in fact, had not even been to class.

A previous incarnation of SEVIS, which Congress mandated in 1996, met with strong opposition from lobbyists within the educational community, according to an INS official. Colleges and universities feared that, in order to fund the development of a national student database, tuition would have to be raised to a degree that could bar international students from matriculating to American schools.

This argument was convincing before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the database never progressed past its initial planning stages. But when terrorist hijackers were linked to unmonitored student visas, the educational community dropped its opposition to a database of international students.

Now, Harvard is eager to be seen as compliant with the program, making a concerted effort to meet SEVIS’s requirements, says Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations.

The University wanted to “do its best” to meet the program’s demands to show that it was not to blame for complications or delays that might arise in the data transfer process, he explained.

The HIO started working toward SEVIS deadlines early.

“We’ve been working on this for months,” Ladd says. “This is all happening within a very tight timeline.”

Harvard’s six-month extension could allow Harvard to learn from other colleges’ and universities’ experiences with the brand-new system, Ladd says.

A Messy Past

Not all universities foresaw an easy transition to the new system.

The INS eliminated SEVIS training sessions in August, replacing them with telephone help lines and video explanations of the new service.

The new database has a poor technical track record. A trial version of the SEVIS software released over the summer was so full of technical bugs that it was virtually unusable, many university administrators complained.

On Jan. 27, the INS held workshops throughout the country to address mounting confusion as the deadline for SEVIS implementation approached.

At the conference in Boston—before the deadline had been extended to mid-February—450 university officials convened to get information and express their fears.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, many administrators at the conference said they feared that the INS would not be able to remedy the program in time. Some institutions would have to update their own databases to be SEVIS-compliant—a process that would ordinarily require several months of work.

Ladd, who attended the local presentation, says the INS representative who addressed a crowd of anxious university representatives seemed aware of SEVIS’s slowness and technological shortcomings.

“She seemed very well informed,” Ladd says. “It was encouraging.”

Shortly after the conference, the INS offered educational institutions nationwide a deadline extension for registration—a gesture aiming to ensure that the new system would be manageable for everyone involved, says INS spokesperson Karen Kraushaar.

“It was certainly reasonable for them to be allowed to get their systems up and running in the way that is most enabling for everybody,” she says.

The INS continues to consult with major figures in the educational community to find an expedient and reasonable path to SEVIS registration, she says.

Ladd maintains that Harvard is already partway down the right road. Seeing representatives of Harvard’s peers at the Jan. 27 workshop affirmed her confidence in the University’s preparedness, relative to that of other institutions.

“We’re at least in a comparable position, and some would say we’re in a better position,” she says.

Over the past few months, HIO has been building a new database for its own information on international students. The new system is SEVIS-compliant, Ladd says.

Starting from Jan. 30, when Harvard received approval for SEVIS use, the HIO has been required to enter SEVIS data for all new student visa applications that it processed.

But fortunately for the University, Ladd says, the number of international students needing new visas before the end of the semester will be negligible.

Yet, looking ahead, she emphasizes that SEVIS’s challenges are not over.

“It’s going to be a trying time in terms of things not happening,” she says. “We’re here to help students as much as we can.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.