NEW YORK: As a trickle of Middle Eastern college students head back home from the United States, officials are looking for better ways to track the ones who remain behind.

In the days following the September 11 attacks, police swooped down on campuses throughout the United States, prompted by revelations that one of the alleged hijackers who crashed into the Pentagon entered the country on a student visa. He never showed up at the California language school that admitted him.

Investigators asked schools for everything from addresses of specific students to detailed lists of everyone enrolled on student visas, says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO).

Some police departments sought the information merely to protect Middle Eastern students against reprisals, Nassirian adds.

Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government provided information about a former student after receiving a court- ordered subpoena. And William Carey College in Hattiesburg, Missisipi, politely said it had no students from the Middle East when police phoned on September 11.

Overall, more than 200 colleges and universities have provided investigators with information about students since the attacks, a survey by the AACRAO found. Most of the investigators’ questions concerned Middle Eastern or Muslim students.

Now, lawmakers are proposing improved monitoring of all 500,000 foreign students enrolled in American colleges and vocational schools.

Privacy laws: Federal privacy laws prevent the release of most student records, and colleges usually err on the side of student privacy.

But in this case, the US Department of Education invoked a health and safety exception to pry open files. Most schools heeded the call to cooperate, Nassirian says.

“Colleges are caught in an awkward place,” says Sarah Flanagan of the National Association of Independent Colleges of Universities. “You don’t want to be sitting on information that could prevent another incident.” Fewer than a dozen institutions told the students involved.

Part of the problem, school officials say, is that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) lacks an effective way to keep tabs on foreign students.

Getting lost in the system: Colleges are required to tell the INS when a student drops out or graduates, but it takes months for the INS to enter data from the manual reports that schools submit. As a result, foreign students can remain in the US unchallenged for years.

To some legislators, the current approach to administering student visas invites abuse.

As an alternative, Senator Christopher Bond (R) of Missouri proposed adopting a 30-day waiting period before issuing student visas to give consular officers more time to check backgrounds. Student visas account for about 2 per cent of entries into the US each year. Only 25 Iraqi, Iranian, and Afghan nationals are currently enrolled in American universities and most of them are refugees, says David Ward, president of the American Council on Education in Washington.

But universities have many reasons to keep the doors wide open to foreign students. In addition to what they bring to campus both academically and culturally, foreign students contribute considerably to university coffers, as they usually pay full tuition. —Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor News Service.