University puts student tracking program on hold

More than 2,000 schools nationwide began switching to a new international student tracking system Thursday, however TCU is waiting to see how the online program works for other universities, International Student Affairs Director John Singleton said.

Any school wishing to enroll foreign students has to meet the standards of the new program called the Student and Exchange Visitors Information System (SEVIS). It is a web-based system that allows Immigration and Naturalization Service to track which applicants colleges accept, when they arrive, when they leave and what they are doing while they are in the United States, Singleton said.

Singleton said the TCU has met all the initial requirements for SEVIS but that the university will not go online until the end of March.

“There are (more than) 2,000 schools that are using the program,” Singleton said. “We are going to wait and see how the system works before we go online.”

He said TCU will have little involvement with INS officials, because they can access all the information online.

“The primary purpose is to ensure that when a student enters the country they enroll and are attending their classes,” Singleton said. “The number of international students here is not too large and we have a good idea of who’s going to class.”

International students say the new system is invasive but understandable given the circumstances.

“I can understand that they need to increase tracking of (international) students,” Shwetha Fernandes-Prabhu, a business graduate student, said. “They already have many requirements for students, I really can’t imagine what more they can ask.”

Singleton said despite TCU’s lack of problems with tracking its international students they have to use SEVIS.

“Transferring to SEVIS is not mandatory,” Singleton said. “But we must transfer over to SEVIS or stop accepting international students altogether.”

Manochehr Dorraj, a political science professor, said the program has a legitimate reason for being created.

“It has to do with the Sept. 11 tragedy,” Dorraj said. “It has to do with a few of the terrorists who were (international) students.”

He said there is no other country on earth that is as big a cultural center or as alluring as the United States.

“No other nation draws as many (international) students,” Dorraj said.

According to Fox News, the program was created in response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, where one of the accused perpetrators was a Palestinian immigrant who had entered the United States as a student at Wichita State University but then dropped out and stayed in the country. Fox News said in 1996 Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which mandated the creation of an electronic reporting and tracking system for international students.