Tufts to use government program to track international students

Institutions across the country are working to meet the Jan. 30 deadline for the implementation of a new screening process for foreign students called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) will use the program to keep track of all international students in the United States and to ensure that they are attending schools where they claim to be.

The demand for an electronic tracking system came to the forefront after it was discovered that some of the Sept. 11 terrorists entered the country on student visas, but the issue initially emerged after the World Trade Center bombings in 1993. In 1996, Congress mandated the creation of SEVIS, with an implementation deadline of Jan. 30, 2003 _ a deadline that was abandoned in 2000. The USA Patriot Act passed last year reinstated the deadline and injected $36.8 million into the project.

As one of the approximately 7,400 post-secondary schools that accept foreign students, Tufts is working to comply with the deadline. This deadline is considered unrealistic by many experts, who have compared the project with sending a man to the moon, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

But Tufts is confident that the system will be running in time and does not foresee any major complications, said Debbie Nanni, who is in charge of implementing SEVIS for Tufts through Tufts Computing and Communication System (TCCS). This entails the acquisition and implementation of new software and coordination between registrar's offices, human resources and the international offices on the Medford and Boston campuses.

Given the large number of foreign students at the University, SEVIS will be implemented in phases. Eventually, the transmission of information from Tufts databases to SEVIS will be automated.

TCCS will be responsible for the maintenance of a centralized system and for storing and transmitting data to SEVIS. "The international offices, human resources, and the registrars will ultimately share responsibility for the data stored in this system," Nanni said.

Colleges, universities, and vocational schools must pay a fee of $580 to apply to the INS to use SEVIS, according to an INS news release. Institutions will then issue visas through SEVIS, and the government will bar new foreign students from entering the country without their school's prior notification. Non-compliance would prohibit schools from issuing visas, which would seriously compromise their ability to admit international students.

The main reason for the delay in initiating the SEVIS program has been problems with funding. The INS was considering fees for universities until Congress allocated money this year.

Although Tufts has not yet had any problems, many other schools have experienced difficulties in the system's trial runs. Initially, foreign students' information had to be entered by hand, a process made more difficult by the fact that 81 percent of the 547,867 international students studying in the US were enrolled at only 449 colleges, according to a report from the Institute of International Education.

The labor-intensive process of entering data by hand may be solved by SEVIS's "batch" capabilities, which allow colleges to transmit information directly from their existing files. Any flaws in the batch transmissions, however, could strand all of a school's the foreign students outside of the country.

Without batch transmissions, though, colleges might be forced to hire employees to enter all of the information manually. Mistakes in recording the information, whether through batch transmissions or manual entry, could lead to many students being unable to come into the country.

Another problem that schools encountered is that while visa forms for students are handled by the INS, visas for visiting scholars _ a label that encompasses professors, researchers, and other academics _ are handled by the State Department, which developed SEVIS forms later.

The reported SEVIS problems are occurring because the system was developed "before all of the detailed specifications were nailed down," Nanni said. "Given the magnitude of the task and the number of schools and people involved, the glitches, while frustrating, should not detract from the significant progress that has occurred and continues to occur."

Schools have also complained about the cancellation of campus training seminars that would have helped university personnel learn to use SEVIS. Instead, the INS maintains a help desk and has released a training video. Many college officials are skeptical of the video's effectiveness, though, emphasizing that the training sessions were the only face-to-face contact with INS representatives.

Although only 1,283 schools are currently approved for SEVIS, a total of 3,377 institutions are in contact with the INS. An INS news report recently stated that the agency is "confident that we have the resources at hand to certify all schools that apply to use SEVIS."