This new database is the result of congressional concerns about poor information on international students following the discovery that several of the Sept. 11 hijackers had entered the country on student visas. One hijacker, in fact, had not even been to class.

A previous incarnation of SEVIS, which Congress mandated in 1996, met with strong opposition from lobbyists within the educational community, according to an INS official. Colleges and universities feared that, in order to fund the development of a national student database, tuition would have to be raised to a degree that could bar international students from matriculating to American schools.

This argument was convincing before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the database never progressed past its initial planning stages. But when terrorist hijackers were linked to unmonitored student visas, the educational community dropped its opposition to a database of international students.

Now, Harvard is eager to be seen as compliant with the program, making a concerted effort to meet SEVIS’s requirements, says Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations.

The University wanted to “do its best” to meet the program’s demands to show that it was not to blame for complications or delays that might arise in the data transfer process, he explained.

The HIO started working toward SEVIS deadlines early.

“We’ve been working on this for months,” Ladd says. “This is all happening within a very tight timeline.”

Harvard’s six-month extension could allow Harvard to learn from other colleges’ and universities’ experiences with the brand-new system, Ladd says.

A Messy Past

Not all universities foresaw an easy transition to the new system.

The INS eliminated SEVIS training sessions in August, replacing them with telephone help lines and video explanations of the new service.

The new database has a poor technical track record. A trial version of the SEVIS software released over the summer was so full of technical bugs that it was virtually unusable, many university administrators complained.

On Jan. 27, the INS held workshops throughout the country to address mounting confusion as the deadline for SEVIS implementation approached.

At the conference in Boston—before the deadline had been extended to mid-February—450 university officials convened to get information and express their fears.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, many administrators at the conference said they feared that the INS would not be able to remedy the program in time. Some institutions would have to update their own databases to be SEVIS-compliant—a process that would ordinarily require several months of work.