Nevada sees deadline pass for student database

Jennifer Knight

Thursday, Feb. 27, 2003 | 10:57 a.m.

Nevada's higher education institutions failed to meet the deadline for setting up a computer system that is supposed to track immigrant college students, and it is unclear when the system will be fully operational, officials said.

As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, colleges, universities and flight schools were required to have the new Student and Exchange Visitors Information System -- commonly called the SEVIS database -- in place by Feb. 15.

But a late start, confusion about how to comply with federal requirements and last-minute computer glitches combined to cause the blown deadline.

"It's a joke. It's been less than organized," said Joseph Nesbitt, a network computer technician for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "We've been planning for SEVIS compliance for a year, but we didn't have the (computer specifications) until recently, so we just had to wait."

Once the SEVIS database is in full swing, it will allow Immigration and Naturalization Services to have up-to-date information on the comings and goings of the 583,000 international students studying in the United States. The system will notify INS officials any time students change their address, or major or do not show up for school.

But schools still face problems with implementing the SEVIS requirements. One of the issues is that school officials did not receive information on how the system was to be set up until December. Once the INS released the specifications necessary for computer programmers to set up their SEVIS database, technicians worked feverishly to finish databases.

"We're still testing it," said Robert Weed, manager of data warehousing at the Community College System of Nevada. "It has been a fairly significant effort in a pretty short time."

Even as the deadline passed, there seemed to be no clear guideline for what needed to be turned in by Feb. 15, nor was there any real penalty for tardiness, local officials said.

"There was some debate as to what compliance really meant," said Karen Dorman, the officer in charge of the Las Vegas INS office.

The idea for SEVIS originated after it was learned that the accused 1993 World Trade Center bomber was a Palestinian who had entered the country as a student. The tracking system only gained approval by Congress after Sept. 11, 2001, when it was learned that one of the terrorists had also entered the U.S. with a student visa.

But one thing Congress did not do was provide money for schools to buy software for the tracking system. Most schools with more than 150 foreign students had to buy their own software.

Officials at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said they were unable to provide the software costs to the Sun, but Community College of Southern Nevada officials said they spent more than $10,000 on computer software to meet the mandate.

Some big changes came with the new rules, officials said.

"There were some pretty significant changes that caught us by surprise," said Susan Bender, UNR's director of the office of international students and scholars.

Bender said that UNR had about 20 immigrant students with spouses who were also taking classes -- some part-time. Under the old rules, the spouse was allowed to take classes without applying for a student visa. Now, the law requires them to reapply for a student visa, pay out-of-state tuition and become full-time or quit altogether.

Schools will also change the way they process visa applications. Instead of filling out an I-20 student visa form and sending it to the INS, they will now be processing that form online.

So far, 3,900 institutions, including those in Nevada, have been approved by the INS to set up SEVIS systems, but INS officials said they don't know how many institutions nationally have completed their databases.

While schools try to get their new databases working, the INS has provided access to the SEVIS system through the Internet.

The system is often busy, however, and every time school officials want to enter an update on a student, they must fill out in its entirety a form that already exists in their own database system, officials said.

"So far, the online system that is up and running is very cumbersome," Bender said. "It was crashing and took an hour or more to print an I-20. Now, we're just waiting until the end of the day to work on it so that we're not competing with other schools."