In June 1997 a pilot project began in several southern universities to electronically track international students and scholars studying in the United States. However, the program had its share of complaints from universities and then there were the funding issues.
Fast forward to Sept. 11 when the government learned several of the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were trained in American flight schools; while one of them entered the United States on a student visa and never showed up to school.
The issue was once again front and center.
Before the pilot program, Coordinated Interagency Part-nership Regulating International Students (CIPRIS), schools were supposed to be tracking international students in accordance with the Illegal Immigrant and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996, but the system was slow and flawed.
On Jan. 30, 2003, CIPRIS culminated its steady change and was implemented nationwide as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).
SEVIS will give the Immigra-tion and Naturalization Service (INS) the digital ability to monitor all international students from the moment they enter the country.
Currently, there are 500,000 international students in the United States and for each one of them SEVIS means change. One of the major changes involves a loss of privacy.
While the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects records for students who are citizens, SEVIS requires all international students to sign an I-20 form when they enter the United States.
This form relinquishes their right to privacy and allows INS to look at their records at any time.
Henry Ankiewitz, director of the Office of International Programs at ETSU, said it is inevitable that the government would have this kind of interest in international students.
“We want to protect the rights of the student, but at the same time cooperate with the laws of the country,” he said.
Restrictions are also being placed on the amount of time international students have to complete their degrees, the number of Internet courses a student can take (one) and the maximum amount of time (30 days) they can arrive on campus before the beginning of each semester.
Although the government has come a long way fixing the tracking problem some say there is a lot more to be done.
INS isn’t properly funded and is understaffed, both of which are headaches for the problems they’re trying to smooth out.
Maria Costa, international programs advisor at ETSU, said one of the problems with the SEVIS program is that it is huge and may have been implemented too fast.
While some universities have close to 2,000 international students, ETSU has only has about 150 international students because it does not actively recruit. Many of the students are from India and China.

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