Under a new University policy, graduate and professional students who are not U.S. citizens must provide documented proof of their legal status in the United States in order to enroll or continue enrollment at Duke.
In an April memo to the deans of the various schools and directors of admissions and financial aid, Provost Peter Lange explained that all non-citizen students will now be required to present "evidence of immigration status" to the International Office by the first day of classes. Graduate and professional students failing to do so will not be allowed to enroll until they have obtained lawful status, but undergraduates will not be held to the same standard.
The new policy states that undergraduates not in lawful status will be allowed to enroll, and will simply be advised of the risks to being out of status. Ruderman said there is no federal law that prevents the University from enrolling students without an appropriate visa.
Vice Provost for Academic and Administrative Affairs Judith Ruderman said the University's leniency toward undergraduates stems from an understanding of a number of factors over which undergraduates, but not graduate and professional students, may have little control with regard to obtaining lawful status.
"Undergraduates are only 17 or 18 years old when they come to college," Ruderman explained. "Sometimes these kids don't even know they're not in legal status and they need time to get into legal status. We only have one requirement-that they tell us truthfully what status they're in on the application."
Graduate and professional students, on the other hand, will be held to more stringent requirements by the University. "They're presumed to have learned the law and to know their status by that point because they're over 21 years old," Ruderman said. "They have had time to get into legal status by the time they need to enroll."
After the implementation of the new policy, the International Office contacted the University's individual schools with names of students who were of "unknown" status. The schools then contacted these students to request proper documentation, granting deadline extensions on a case-by-case basis.
Catheryn Cotten, director of the International Office, said some extensions are granted with an understanding that student visas are harder to procure now than in years past. "Security advisory opinions may cause consular offices to look more closely at scholars' and graduate students' visa applications," she said. She added that despite the State Department's best efforts to accommodate students and scholars in a rigid visa application environment, factors such as stricter interview guidelines have created more delays.
There are currently fewer than five outstanding "unknowns" in University records-a marked decrease from before the implementation of the new policy, Ruderman said. So far, only one student - a non-degree seeking continuing education student-has withdrawn from the University.
Ruderman said the University adopted the new policy due to an increasing number of students who were of "unknown" legal status in University records. In the 2002-2003 academic year, about 96 international students' documents were unaccounted for.
Before the implementation of the new policy in April, prospective students were expected to notify the University of their legal status on their applications, but the information provided on the application was more or less taken on good faith, Cotten said. The result was a number of "unknowns" in University records.
Ruderman said such cases were traditionally rare. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, however, there was an increasing number of "unknowns" - a trend she said gave rise to concern.
"The threat of terrorism really raised everybody's consciousness about who are the students in our institutions," Ruderman said. "We should at least be able to say who they are, and whether they have legal status in our country."
Cotten said the new policy also addresses issues of inaccurate or incomplete record keeping within the University's own databases and was spurred in part by the USA PATRIOT Act, passed shortly after Sept. 11, which requires universities to track foreign students and scholars.
"Across the country, universities have been looking more closely at their record keeping since PATRIOT and since Sept. 11," Cotten said, adding that the University's new obligation to do electronic reporting on international students has brought attention to some areas where the University needs to reevaluate its data sources.
Cotten added that issues regarding federal reporting requirements converged with concerns about students' eligibility for financial aid and with more general and ongoing reviews of how the University manages information. Although Cotten said administrative details - not health or terrorism concerns - drove discussions of the new policy, she noted that health and terrorism concerns have nevertheless come to play a bigger role in the visa, and thus enrollment, process for international students since Sept. 11.
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