After nearly a decade of delays and glitches, a nationwide database of all international students at universities and trade schools across the country became officially operational on Saturday.

Although the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) has been in the works since the mid-1990s,

the registration program became a major national priority after federal investigators discovered that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists had entered the country on student visas.

The Saturday deadline was an extension from an initial deadline in January.

The penalty for not complying with the SEVIS system is steep—a suspension of a school’s ability to enroll international students—and over the past several months, many have expressed fear that the long-troubled system would be a disaster.

Officials with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and with universities nationwide have been working at a frenzied pace to make SEVIS work, but it’s too soon to tell whether the system will be fully successful.

Most schools across the country are now in the process of registering all their new second-semester students with SEVIS, which is run by the INS, as a prelude to a major registration rush that will crescendo over the summer as schools load up all of their international students.

Because Harvard’s second semester began just before the registration deadline, the University has an extension until August.

Harvard officials say they’re planning to do everything necessary comply with the demands of the new system, including hiring temporary workers for data-entry and restructuring their database of international students to make the transition easier.

Harvard has worked diligently to meet SEVIS deadlines from the beginning, according to Sharon Ladd, director of the Harvard International Office (HIO).

And the University expects to overleap hurdles that SEVIS may cast in its path over the coming months, Ladd says.

“We’re ready,” she says. “The University will be compliant.”

Harvard received INS approval to use the database on the afternoon of Jan. 30, meeting the first registration deadline. Since then, it has been required to enter information from any visa applications that pass through its office in the SEVIS database.

A Sea Change

Unlike the former system of information gathering, through which U.S. schools would send information about its international students to the INS for entry by hand, SEVIS establishes a single, nationwide database and requires institutions to update it themselves.