Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College have met today's federal deadline to record all foreign-student enrollments in a computerized federal tracking system, officials said Thursday.

The federal government wants better tracking of international students to discourage terrorists' use of student visas to gain entry into the United States. Garrison Courtney, spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service in March, said the system will also help prevent immigration fraud.

The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System requires colleges and universities to document each foreign student's name, local address, enrollment status and other information in a centralized computer database. Such information has been gathered on paper since World War II.

"The biggest thing it does is take a really old, outdated paper system and essentially leap it into the 21st century,' Courtney said.

As of Thursday, more than 6,000 U.S. schools were in compliance, and 500 more were still completing the process.

With close to 1,600 foreign students enrolled at the campus, CSULB has one of the largest foreign student bodies in the California State University system.

"We're in pretty good shape I think,' said Donald Delgado, director of the university's International Student Services. "We've gone through all of our continuing students and checked our roster and put in all the continuing students we can identify. We have a couple that we're missing one or two pieces of information on, but, for all intents and purposes, it's done.'

Like at many other universities, the process of entering students in the SEVIS system wasn't nearly as difficult as the process of securing visas. Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, stringent security background checks have slowed the process of applying for visas almost to a crawl.

Several foreign students have had to withdraw from the upcoming fall semester because they have not yet secured their visas, or their appointments could not be scheduled until well after classes begin on Sept. 2, Delgado said.

Officials said they met the deadlines only through a lot of hard work. UCLA, for example, enrolls the largest number of international students in the country approximately 5,000 of a total enrollment of 30,000, including more than 2,500 graduate students, many of whom bring their families with them.