INS extends deadline for foreign student tracking system

The Immigration and Naturalization Service is giving schools two more weeks to begin using the agency's new automated system for tracking foreign students living in the United States.

The INS extended the Jan. 30 deadline for compliance with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) because some schools are having problems making their computer systems compatible with SEVIS, an agency spokesman said Thursday.

"We are going to take two extra weeks to work with schools to make sure their systems can talk to the SEVIS system," said INS spokesman Chris Bentley.

Public and private schools that enroll foreign students now have until Feb. 15 to register with SEVIS. After Feb. 15, schools cannot enroll new foreign students for study in the United States until they comply with SEVIS rules. Schools have until Aug. 1 to enter information about current nonimmigrant foreign students attending their institutions, according to a Dec.11 rule published in the Federal Register.

SEVIS is designed to replace the paper-based system the agency now uses to track foreign students in the United States, eliminating delays in notification by informing all parties simultaneously once an INS decision on a visa application is completed. Although the State Department is responsible for issuing student visas to foreign students who want to study in the United States, the INS must monitor each student's stay in the country and determine which schools are eligible to accept foreign students.

Though SEVIS is more efficient than the paper-based system, the system is still very unpredictable, said Catheryn Cotten, director of the international office at Duke University.

"The INS estimated that it should take 30 minutes to enter information for one student [in SEVIS]," Cotten said, "but in the last two days, we spent two hours getting one student in the system." She said the system was moving so slowly that it eventually logged off users before they could finish entering a student's information. "It was a little better today [Thursday] because I think the INS did some major upgrades last night," Cotten said.

Duke, which participated in the SEVIS pilot program, has between 1,400 and 1,500 international students enrolled. Although the Feb. 15 deadline for registering with SEVIS does not apply to Duke because it has been using the system for a year, the university still has to submit a report on every international student to the INS by Feb. 13. SEVIS regulations require schools registered in the system to provide the agency with each foreign student's enrollment status and address 30 days after the current semester's drop/add period for courses ends.

"We have a huge number of students to do reports on right now," Cotten said. "This is a big deadline for us, and if we don't do it [in time] we are in violation of a federal regulation." Cotten said Duke has five people working on the SEVIS project.

The other universities that participated in the pilot program-Auburn University in Alabama, Clemson University in South Carolina and the University of Alabama-all have to meet the same reporting deadline, Cotten said.

Cotten praised the INS for responding to the university's technical and regulatory questions about the program, and said the agency has used feedback from users to make upgrades to SEVIS. Still, she said, "everyone's nerves are a little frayed right now… and they have been less helpful in the last few weeks because there is so much to do."

Cotten said the success of SEVIS would depend largely on whether the agency's system was robust enough to handle large amounts of traffic at one time without crashing. She also expressed concern about the errors that could occur as a result of the constant information sharing between the schools and the INS-and the consequences for a foreign student whose record is adversely affected because of a simple mistake.

"Schools worry that in the middle of all this tossing back and forth of student information that the data will not be accurate and that things will get corrupted…. These are normal worries in a data exchange environment, but people are affected by that," Cotten said.