Colleges track, register foreign students

WASHINGTON -- One day into the federal government's high-tech push to track foreign students, Peggy Hudson of Lewis & Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill., breathed a sigh of frustration.\n"I've been working on that all day," said Hudson, enrollment director for a college with about 10 international students any given school year. "I'm having trouble filling out the (online) enrollment form."\nBut she's upbeat about the Immigration and Naturalization Service's new system, which is aimed at preventing terrorism by helping to close long-existing gaps in the tracking of foreign visitors to the United States.\n"My opinion is: When all the kinks are worked out, it's going to be better, because it will offer us a better way of keeping track of them ... I'm kind of excited about it," she said.\nThe Student and Exchange Visitor Information System is an Internet-driven method that all U.S. schools with international students must use come Jan. 30. Schools will use the system to alert immigration officials of a foreign student's campus address, course schedule and any disciplinary action taken against them -- or if they fail to show up at school.\nOne of the Sept. 11 hijackers had entered the country on a student visa, but never appeared at the California school where he enrolled. The new system will require schools to alert the immigration service electronically when that happens -- and law enforcement will be alerted of no-shows.\nThis week, some schools got an early chance to join the system and kiss their paper-based tracking systems goodbye. Just 38 applied to do so last Monday -- the Web site's first day -- according to Terrance O'Reilly, of the immigration service.\nBut schools with large foreign-student populations, such as Washington University, didn't even try. Right now, the only way schools can communicate with the new system is by entering student records one-by-one on the Web site. That's fine for Lewis and Clark, but Washington University prefers to wait until the system can accept hundreds of records simultaneously.\n"We're dealing with about 2,200 people -- 1,200 students and 1,000 scholars -- and so the only way we can do this is through the batch process," said Kathy Steiner-Lang, director of Washington University's Office for International Students and Scholars.\nBill Strassberger, a spokesman for the immigration service, said he expects that kink to be worked out by sometime in the fall -- too late for the preliminary enrollment now under way.\nToni Liston, director of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville's international student services office, said for larger schools, compatible software will be costly. "The ones I have seen ranged anywhere from $4,000 to $30,000 -- so we're doing a lot of shopping and that's going to continue through the summer and fall"