After months of working to comply with new foreign-student registration systems established in the wake of Sept. 11, Harvard International Office (HIO) Director Sharon Ladd says her office is poised to meet a crucial deadline at the beginning of August.

Working “nights and weekends” since early May, the HIO has been transferring thousands of pieces of information into Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a national computerized database of foreign students that officials at educational institutions across the nation have criticized for technical flaws and ambiguous demands.

Harvard will have records for all 3,500 of its international students, all 2,000 of its international scholars and all of their dependents entered into the system by the end of the month, Ladd says.

Meanwhile, the looming SEVIS deadline has combined with a usual flurry of summer activity to turn the HIO’s busiest season into a hectic race toward the federal finish line.

“It’s been a real push, but we’ve done it,” Ladd says. “We have a few more people who need to get in the database, and we’ve just run our final lists.”

The SEVIS database contains information about international students and scholars’ visa statuses, residences and programs of study at the University. As the first national computerized database of the United States’ foreign scholars, it enables—and requires—colleges, universities and trade schools throughout the country to update foreign students’ records electronically, and replaces the old paper-based system.

The database, which Congress fast-tracked after learning that three of the Sept. 11 hijackers had entered the country on student visas, was intended to provide the former Immigration and Naturalization Service with an up-to-date record of every foreign student’s status.

But in the short term, SEVIS brought a host of new travails and acute setbacks to the international offices of colleges nationwide.

From the first trial version of SEVIS last summer, international administrators at several institutions complained that the database was riddled with technical flaws and logistical weaknesses that made it impossible to use.

“Schools report that SEVIS frequently loses data that has been properly entered into the system,” President of the American Council on Education David Ward explained at a congressional hearing on SEVIS in April—one of several national forums convened to discuss concerns about the system’s problems.

“Many schools report that their immigration forms have printed out on the computers of other schools,” he said.

Reports of lost or misdirected data and an ineffective data-entry system became more dire when many institutions—Harvard not among them—complained publicly that the INS offered insufficient support for administrators learning to use the new system.

But according to Ladd, government agencies have been working continuously to remedy these flaws and the system is now functioning.

“I think that they have, to a great degree, addressed many of the glitches in the system,” she says. “There are ongoing investigations between government people and people in our profession.”

The HIO has been satisfied with recent governmental support, she adds.