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Security Clearance Delays Lessening
By Gwendolyn Bradley
In February, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it would extend security clearances for foreign students and scientists in some science and technology fields so that visas obtained under the Visas Mantis program will generally remain current for four years instead of having to be renewed annually. The program, which aims to prevent terrorists from gaining access to sensitive nuclear, biomedical, and computing information, has been criticized for imposing layers of red tape that make it difficult for legitimate scholars to obtain security clearances.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, long waits for clearances meant that many students and scholars missed academic conferences or arrived late in the semester for courses that they were scheduled to attend or teach. Such delays have been cited as one cause of declining foreign enrollments in U.S. graduate programs. But the Government Accountability Office announced, also in February, that the average wait for security clearances has fallen from sixty-seven days to fifteen days over the preceding year. For more information about issues facing foreign students and scholars, see the Government Relations column in this issue.
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