The lives of international students in United States higher education will soon be open books because universities are now required to use a new electronic student tracking system.

Traditionally, constant contact between international students and their respective international departments was mandatory. Now universities are required to forward student information to the INS using the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) -- with a click of a button, the INS will have access to students' private information and school records -- and privacy groups are balking at this perceived invasion. The INS, however, maintains the significance of the system, which allows better tracking of international students studying on U.S. soil as a way to increase national security.


A Gradual Beginning
SEVIS is a real-time Internet-based system and was developed during 1995 and 1996 as a mandated congressional response to the World Trade Center attack in 1993. A lack of funds prevented full implementation at the time, so the system remained unused. But in October 2002, the USA Patriot Act set aside $34 million to implement SEVIS in universities throughout the United States.

"We have been using those funds to fully implement the system and fully certify those schools wishing to participate in the system," said INS spokesman Chris Bentley, who added that once implemented, SEVIS' function will be clear. The information students already relinquish will be automatically forwarded to the INS.

"SEVIS is responsible for managing the same information the schools are already maintaining about foreign students on their campuses," Bentley said. "It can be information like the student's name, their date of birth, their address, their major, what their status is as far as how many credit hours they're taking."

For the system to be implemented, universities must comply with INS regulations regarding SEVIS. This entails a number of procedural updates, infrastructure overhauls, and in some cases, personnel adjustments.


Implementation Breakdown
For universities to accept international students, they must be certified participants in the SEVIS program.

First, they must assess their infrastructure and personnel to determine whether outsourcing the systems necessary to interface with the INS database is needed.

Universities must also upgrade their existing systems, dipping into their pockets to cover the cost -- which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on whether the university implements the program in-house.

Universities can choose to do one of three things, according to Patty Croom, technical project manager for Michigan State University's SEVIS implementation. "They're either buying a vendor product -- designed to handle the office of international students and scholars -- and interfacing with SEVIS; they're working with their ERP vendor and those vendors are making their product SEVIS compliant; or they're doing something in-house," she said.

In the event of outsourcing, companies like Information Builders will visit schools and conduct free one- or two-day compliance evaluations, reviewing the systems and establishing what they need to do, said Steve Waldman, higher education practice director for Information Builders. "After that, if they decide to use our software, we would define a project, determine the cost of the software for the size of the institution and bring in a couple of people for a few days to integrate the front end with the back end."

For Michigan State, the process requires financial, personnel and policy considerations. Regulatory changes impact offices around the university and offices' interactions with the INS, causing a definite workload increase, Croom said. "International student and scholar offices have not generally been highly automated," she said. "There are exceptions. But nationally they were nowhere near where, say, a registrar's office was, so it's a major leap in technology. It's a huge leap in technology for the INS as well."

The technology relies on the marriage of a university's existing records