The University will start reporting new information on international students to the INS by Jan. 31 to comply with new government regulations, University officials said.
Because of a timeline set by last year's Patriot Act bill — passed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks — the University must forward information on all international students and visiting faculty to the Immigration and Naturalization Service by next fall.
Only students and scholars new to the University in the spring will be affected by the January deadline.
Though the government has yet to finalize its guidelines for reporting, schools that fail to disclose the information properly may not be allowed to accept international students.
Through SEVIS, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, the INS will track specific attributes of international scholars, such as enrollment, field of study, name and address changes, full-time status and graduation date.
Date of arrival and port of entry will also be checked.
The only new information required is disciplinary action as a result of a criminal conviction.
The regulations will apply to all students or faculty on an F-, Jor M-type visa.
No single nation or region is singled out in the proposed government guidelines, said Mary Idzior, director of visa services for the University's general counsel.
Most international students have F-type visas while exchange students, visiting scholars and some graduate students doing postdoctoral work hold J-type visas.
M-type visas are held by vocational students, a group largely absent from the University.
Idzior emphasized that SEVIS has been in the works for years, starting with pilot programs tested after the landmark immigration act of 1996 called for a national database of student visa holders.
"We always had to keep information on students," she said. "We just never had to report it [unless specifically] asked."
The University has collected and held this information for years, but the last time the INS requested a thorough report was in the late 1980s, Idzior said.
The main test of the University's system for disclosure will come next fall, when information on the more than 1,000 currently enrolled international students is due.
After regulations are finalized, an educational campaign will be held for students affected by the provision, Idzior said.
The University's compliance will require cooperation between OIT and the visa services branch of the general counsel's office.
Ted Bross, OIT's manager of data integration services, said the information will come from the PeopleSoft administrative management system.
A series of interfaces written by OIT personnel will cull information from the database and send it to visa service's FSA Atlas program, which will forward it in a batch to the INS.
Completing the data transfer electronically saves time and money, Bross said.
He said though the data collected will come from the PeopleSoft database, for which the new SCORE system acts as a portal, the timing of the two systems' placement was independent of any SEVIS requirement.
Bross said the University will not have any problem complying with SEVIS, though the lack of detailed policy on collection procedures from the INS has slowed progress.
"We've been ready since the end of the summer to start working on this," he said, "but you can only go so far until someone tells you [what needs to be done]."
Another difficulty will be collecting information on dependents — such as children and spouses — of Fand J-type visa holders, which must also be transferred to the INS, he said.
Idzior expressed confidence in the University's ability to meet the deadline and said she thinks most schools will also complete the requirements on time.
She stressed that other than the single provision requiring the University to report disciplinary action because of a criminal conviction, the only change made to SEVIS is the procedural requirement of reporting electronically.
"It was in the works," she said. "SEVIS wasn't born out of Sept. 11."
But she also noted that the program will only track students, who make up about two percent of foreign nationals entering the country.
"Is this fixing a problem?" she asked. "What about the other 98 percent?"
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