The university recently expanded its partnership with Terra Dotta, which makes software to manage international and study-abroad programs, to include the company’s new Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) coordinator as a service. CSULA is the first university to adopt this product, aimed at supporting federally required reporting, according to a recent news release.
Matthew Walters, director of the International Programs Office at CSULA, said the service is equivalent to two designated school officials.
“[Without outside assistance], it wouldn't even be possible to maintain services,” he said. “All of your time would be just constantly working on SEVIS and pushing batches [of student data], and there would be no time for the other types of advising that we do to support.”
At the center of the compliance workload is the federal SEVIS, a database created after 9/11 to track international students in the U.S. The system requires schools to continuously update records on enrollment, addresses, employment and other status changes, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website.
Federal law requires designated school officials to maintain those records and meet strict reporting deadlines. Students themselves must also report changes, such as address or employment updates, within days, and schools must put that information into the SEVIS system. Noncompliance can lead to an individual or institution’s designation getting revoked, just as Harvard University’s status was revoked last year.
Those requirements translate into an administrative burden.
“We’re obligated, on a daily basis, to report to SEVIS all of the international student activity,” Walters said.
At CSULA, that burden has collided with shrinking resources. A hiring freeze and a 7.9 percent budget cut for the 2025-26 school year left the international programs office with a single adviser responsible for hundreds of international students, according to a case study from Terra Dotta. The study said this impacted processing times, which doubled from seven to 14 days, and advising interactions, which became more transactional.
Federal policy shifts have added another layer of uncertainty. Last year, a wave of ICE-initiated terminations of students from SEVIS followed student protests, and schools were not notified of the terminations. Though records have now been restored, Walters said this forced staff to manually check for terminations each morning.
“CSULA, along with other international student offices across the country right now, are facing a perfect storm,” said Travis Ulrich, vice president of customer experience at Terra Dotta. “Budgets are being cut, which is resulting in hiring freezes. There's an expanding compliance burden.”
To manage the workload, CSULA relies on a software that acts as a bridge between campus databases and SEVIS, automating data transfers and centralizing student records. A student-facing portal allows students to update information quickly and reduces lag time between the student’s update and the school’s update.
For example, when international students wish to leave the U.S., they are required to receive a travel signature from a designated school official. Without the Terra Dotta portal, students typically scheduled an appointment with an adviser and had to bring a physical copy of their I-20, a document that acts as proof of legal status. Now, signatures are provided automatically, making it easier to accommodate students should they forget or emergencies arise.
“If they have to return home unexpectedly for a death in the family or something very serious, and they don’t have time to submit the request, in the past, they would have been kind of screwed,” Walters said. “But now, with Terra Dotta, they can leave without the request, let us know after the fact that they’re abroad, that they had to leave for this reason, and then we can actually process the request while they’re abroad.”
However, Mathews emphasized that the tool is only as good as the school data it pulls from, and cautioned against garbage-in-garbage-out.
The university also uses Terra Dotta's coordinator as a service, which offers the company's staff with subject matter expertise to handle compliance tasks remotely. According to Ulrich, this helped CSULA reduce compliance-related workload by 53 percent and cut overall costs by $90,000. The university case study reported clearing more than 400 backlogged record changes in three weeks.
“In international offices, there's always a tension between everything you want to do — internationalize the campus, support international students,” Walters said. “But there’s always this compliance piece. It has to be front of mind always.”
