ISSS Next Generation – or Next Gen – provides full visa lifecycle support from admissions to OPT and PERM visas, relieving the IT burden for international officers and enabling them to keep pace with changing compliance demands.
“Amid budget constraints and what’s going on with regulatory compliance, the expectations of administrators to do things faster, more accurately and with less staff are increasing,” Travis Ulrich, Terra Dotta senior vice-president, enterprise solutions, told The PIE News.
While compliance has always been a priority, given recent SEVIS terminations and heightened scrutiny of OPT students, Ulrich said it had “never been as critical as it is today”.
Notably, the new platform interfaces with SEVIS to bring termination data directly to international officers, allowing them to identify and support impacted students.
It is currently being rolled out to Terra Dotta’s 275 partners across the US and has already been adopted by the country’s largest J-1 visa provider.
According to Terra Dotta CEO Ben Psillas, the ISSS platform addresses the “urgent” need for innovative solutions that are “reliable, automated, and designed with the non-technical practitioner in mind”, highlighting the easy-to-use system which was co-developed with industry colleagues.
Compliance has always been top of peoples’ minds, and that’s never been as critical as it is today
Travis Ulrich, Terra Dotta
During the Trump administration’s recent terminations of students’ SEVIS records, many individuals were not aware they had been stripped of their student status until checking the online system, which is maintained by DHS.
Next Gen encompasses the full life cycle of the student journey, providing support on visa processing, uploading passports and financial documents, as well as information about academic culture and living in the US.
What’s more, for the first time, institutions can manage student and scholar services alongside employment-based workflows, with the platform including visa management for post-graduation OPT, STEM, H-1B and PERM visa types.
This is particularly crucial considering the recent DHS letter demanding that OPT students update their SEVIS records with employer information, or face “proceedings to remove [them] from the United States”.
While the notice did not constitute a change in policy, its language fuelled existing anxiety around the threat of deportation, which Terra Dotta hopes the new platform will help to avail by notifying students about when to report on employment.
“We know that’s being watched more closely than ever and could result in a termination,” said Ulrich: “So, after all that hard work put in to get a degree and get a job, it’s critical to provide the right support for those milestones.”
And though the current administration is notoriously hard to predict, for Ulrich: “international education is nothing if not resilient”, with Terra Dotta’s history of working with SEVIS putting it in a strong position to develop future-proofing tools.
With Next Gen, the company is encouraging people to think about what the future holds and consider “what life looks like without being boxed in by legacy solutions built for compliance management 15 years ago… because the world is very different now,” said Ulrich.
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