By MICHAEL ARNONE
The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 11, 2002, Friday

A temporary system set up to identify foreign students while the federal government works out the bugs in a larger effort to track student visas is encountering problems of its own.

By law, colleges had to start using the Interim Student Exchange Authentication System, or Iseas, last month to verify that student-visa applicants had been accepted into college before they entered the United States.

The database was created under orders from Congress, which mandated it as part of the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, which was passed last May.

It is designed to be a stopgap measure to track foreign students until the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis -- a Herculean project to monitor the activities of more than 547,000 foreign students -- is scheduled to become functional on January 30, 2003.

Iseas, created by the U.S. Department of State, and Sevis, developed by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, are completely separate systems that don't share data. Many college officials say that Iseas is a burden the government has sprung on them without warning while they are scrambling to get their campuses ready for Sevis.

"It's an inconvenience that schools would rather not have while they're working on Sevis, but it's something they got to do," says Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director for public policy at Nafsa: Association of International Educators.

Foreign-student administrators say that they are confused about how to enter certain data and that State Department technicians are not providing much help. They also grumble that they have to enter the same information into both Iseas and Sevis, which they see as a waste of time. The biggest complaint from college officials is that the State Department released the rules for Iseas on September 10, only a day before institutions had to begin using the system, says Shelley Rodgers, associate director of government relations and communications for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

"It would have been nice if [the State Department] had made colleges and universities aware that this was coming up, but it really felt that this was coming out of the blue," says Ms. Rodgers.

Worried More About Sevis

Katherine S. Bellows, vice president for public affairs at Nafsa, says that the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act clearly described the interim system, so colleges knew it was coming. Many colleges didn't pay attention to it, however, because they had been hustling to meet the much-larger and more-complex set of requirements for Sevis and other legislation.

Since the September 11 attacks, Congress has passed more laws concerning international education than in the past 20 years combined, says Ms. Bellows, who is also assistant dean and university director for international programs at Georgetown University. "It's phenomenal, the amount of regulations and legislation we've seen," she says, pointing to at least a dozen recent measures. "We're used to having a regulation come out and we munch on it for a couple years."

To use Iseas, college officials need to obtain a password and user name by entering their institution's name and an INS-assigned identification code. Once the user is logged in, the system asks for basic biographical data on each student before assigning a confirmation number that colleges can use to track the student. Before issuing a student visa, a State Department officer must first check Iseas to see if the applicant is enrolled in a legitimate institution. The State Department says that its consular officers can read Iseas information 24 hours after colleges enter it.

The simplicity of the program and the haste with which the State Department developed it, however, have led to a host of problems. Because many colleges were not aware of the program, for instance, they did not notify foreign students who were out of the country that they needed to get a new stamp on their visa. Foreign students must get new stamps outside the United States on a schedule that the State Department bases on their home country. These stamps are necessary to get back into the United States, and students can only get one if their colleges has filed a record for them in Iseas, says Catheryn D. Cotten, who is director of the international office at Duke University.

"Schools have absolutely no way of knowing which of their students need this," she says, since students are not required to tell the colleges when they leave. As a result, some students could be stranded.

Wrong Codes

One of the biggest problems that colleges have with Iseas isn't even the State Department's fault: Some of the codes that the INS has given the department are out-of-date or flat-out wrong, college officials say. For instance, no one could mistake Portland State University, a public university with 1,400 international students, for Rogue Valley Adventist School, a Seventh-day Adventist secondary school in southern Oregon. But that's what happened when Dawn L. White, director of international-education services at Portland State, logged on to Iseas.

The identification codes that the INS has assigned to the two institutions are similar, Ms. White says. The code list that the INS gave the State Department for Iseas incorrectly listed Portland State as Rogue Valley.

When members of Ms. White's staff looked for help, they found that the Web and e-mail links to the State Department help desk were down. When they did get through to the department, it took a week to hear back, and officials said it would take another 10 days to fix the problem.

Ms. White says that all it would take is someone at the State Department to transpose two digits, but no one has done so yet.

In the meantime, she has received more than a dozen phone calls from students wanting to get visas to return for their studies. She is not sure that all of them made it back in time for the first day of class of the fall term, which started September 30.

Iseas doesn't affect many students now because most foreign students have already arrived for the fall term, college officials say. But fall break and the longer Christmas break might cause headaches for some institutions as students travel overseas.

If Sevis isn't fully operational by the January 30 deadline, colleges would have to continue using Iseas for students they admit in the spring term.

Janis Sposato, an INS official involved in developing and running Sevis, told a joint Congressional panel last month that even with three contract companies employing 1,500 people, the INS has a enormous task ahead of it. About 1,000 institutions are now using Sevis, and the INS intends to visit another 6,500 campuses by January 30 to certify their ability to use the system, Ms. Sposato said.

But many aspects of the system will not be as complete as the INS, or colleges, might like by January, she said.

"Sevis is a program, not an event," Ms. Sposato told a joint meeting of two subcommittees of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.