Employees in the Office of International Students and Studies are scrambling to comply with an Aug. 1, 2003 deadline for the submission of personal and academic data about the University's nearly 2,000 international students, researchers and faculty.
Congress's Oct. 2001 Patriot Act set Aug. 1, 2003 as the date by which schools must complete data entry to the federal government's new student and exchange visitor information system.
However, flaws in the SEVIS program have made using the Web-based interface frustrating, said Richard Tanson, an international students and scholars advisor.
"There is the technological burden that the University faces in terms of being compliant with the SEVIS system," Tanson said. "And you have to integrate that with inherent problems from the government side --- system crashes, system errors, bottlenecks."
Because SEVIS is a Web-based interface, data must be individually entered via a web browser for each student or faculty member and his or her dependents until the University can acquire software to help with the awesome task, Tanson said.
"Two advisors in the International Studies office will have to enter everything themselves without any help from anyone else," he said.
Data management software would help tremendously, Tanson said, but the University's procurement process is very slow.
SEVIS has a feature called batch update, with which the information for all the foreign nationals enrolled or employed at the University could be put into the software system and then sent in the early morning hours as a large batch file to the government.
The necessary data includes amount of financial resources, academic program, level of study and disciplinary actions taken due to criminal conviction, among other things.
After Sept. 11, William B. Quandt, vice provost for international affairs, said he does feel the new system is justified, as long as it does not lead to the profiling of students from certain countries.
"The idea that students who come here on student visas should actually enroll in the colleges they're actually going to is a perfectly legitimate concern," Quandt said.
The new visa documents will be bar-coded with unique identifying features, Tanson said.
While international students say the process for registering is not complicated, they are concerned about the amount of information being divulged.
"There have been a couple of orientations and they told us the changes they're making," said second-year Engineering student Shougata Ghosh, who is from Bangladesh. "If you're going to keep a record of people studying here, that's fine, but getting too much in detail isn't."
Third-year Commerce student Mashal Farookee, who is from Pakistan, echoed Ghosh's sentiments.
"It's a little inconvenient," she said. "It feels almost like a tracking system, and that's not the most friendly and inviting system."
Nonetheless, there are severe consequences if the University neglects its responsibility to process students through SEVIS in a timely fashion, Tanson said.
"The ultimate penalty for not being compliant in SEVIS is for the University to lose its ability whatsoever to have international students, scholars and faculty," he said. "That would mean we could no longer maintain the pretension of being a world-class university."
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