Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Companies and Colleges Scramble to Meet New Requirements for Foreign Students By FLORENCE OLSEN PeopleSoft and other companies that provide student-information systems for colleges are scrambling to help institutions meet a tight government deadline for reporting new information about foreign students. PeopleSoft announced on Monday that, by about the end of November, it will add a new interface to its Student Information System. Colleges will be able to use the interface to expedite the exchange of data and electronic forms between their student-information systems and the Immigration and Naturalization Service's new database for tracking international students and faculty members visiting from foreign countries. Colleges are required to begin sending information to the database -- known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis -- as early as January 30, 2003. Other companies that make student-information systems -- Datatel, Jenzabar, Oracle, SAP, and SCT -- have indicated that they will provide similar Sevis products to institutions that use their systems. Institutions that manage their student records and admissions using old or new versions of PeopleSoft's student software will be able to download the Sevis-related software at no charge, PeopleSoft officials said. The company said that five universities will be working closely with PeopleSoft in the next couple of months to complete the software interface between the Sevis and PeopleSoft systems. The five institutions are the California State University System, Duke University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Minnesota system, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Final work on the interface cannot be completed until the INS issues a complete set of technical and data requirements for the Sevis system, which it has promised to do by the end of October, according to Karen Willett, a PeopleSoft official responsible for the Sevis product. Officials at universities that enroll large numbers of foreign students said that they needed an automated way to handle the additional reporting requirements and that the new interface would provide it. The University of Wisconsin at Madison has about 4,000 foreign students, said Paul W. Barrows, vice chancellor for student affairs. "This [interface] will help us tremendously in being able to track that kind of volume of students." Penalties for not meeting the government's new reporting requirements could be severe, causing universities to lose some of their best students, Mr. Barrows said. "If they don't process your I-20 [visa-eligibility forms], you're going to lose the opportunity to recruit some of the best international students," he said. "We're in competition with Canada and Europe and bunch of other places for these students," he said, "and those who are able to process those visas more efficiently certainly put themselves in a better competitive position." Background articles from The Chronicle: Colleges Get Some Breathing Room on Compliance With System to Track Foreign Students (8/20/2002) INS Drops Training Program (8/2/2002) College Groups Clash Over Deadline for Database on Foreign Students (7/5/2002) INS Database Won't Make Deadline (5/31/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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