Overview

A perm is a form of identification assigned to every UC Santa Barbara applicant and student. As the number of applicants and students has steadily increased over the years, the number of available perms has dwindled. Perms are integrated into many campus information systems, so a team of IT professionals has been exploring possible solutions, such as the introduction of an alphanumeric perm, that will responsibly grow with campus for decades to come.

Impact

No students currently – or previously – enrolled at UC Santa Barbara will be impacted by this effort. Alphanumeric perms will be assigned in Fall 2022 (being assigned to the incoming class for Fall 2023). All existing perms will continue to work as they always have, with no expected changes to their length or format.

Project Timeline

  • Discovery, Analysis, and Planning: 6/1/2019 - 12/31/2020
  • Execution and Updates: 1/1/2021 - 5/31/2021
  • Integration Testing and QA: 6/1/2021 - 8/31/2022
  • Go-live: 9/1/22
  • Post-Go-live Support Operations & Maintenance: 9/1/2022 - 6/30/2023

Resources

Campus Communication

Testing

Whitepapers

Presentations

Contact

For questions, concerns, inquiries, and other items related to this project, please send an email to perm@sa.ucsb.edu.

Project Sponsors

Margaret Klawunn, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
Executive Sponsor

Anthony Schmid, Registrar
Business Project Sponsor

Joe Sabado, Interim Deputy CIO
Technical Project Sponsor

Project Team

Josh Andersen
Project Manager

Keri Bradford
Communication Lead

Shajan Kay
Campus Project Coordinator

Seth Northrop
Technical Lead

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

September 1, 2022, is the earliest date that alphanumeric perms are expected to be used on campus and in campus applications/systems.

Currently, a perm is a six-digit student identification number assigned to every UC Santa Barbara student and applicant. Future perms will feature alphanumeric characters.

Perms are assigned to every UC Santa Barbara student and applicant, and as the pool of students and applicants has steadily increased over the years, the number of available perms has dwindled. The current six-digit perm only offers 999,999 unique perm values. Based on current estimates, we anticipate we will run out of available perms as early as 2023, and as late as 2030.

No students currently – or previously – enrolled at UC Santa Barbara will be impacted by this effort. Alphanumeric perms will be assigned in Fall 2022 (being assigned to the incoming class of Winter 2023). All existing perms will continue to work as they always have, with no expected changes to their length or format. Students enrolled starting in Winter 2023 will be assigned alphanumeric perms.

The primary impact to staff will be getting accustomed to any changes related to the appearance or composition of a perm. Additionally, technical staff will need to be involved to determine whether their applications will work with the proposed solution as-is, or if updates will be required to ensure the applications can work with a modified perm.

The primary impact to Faculty will be getting accustomed to any changes related to the appearance or composition of a student perm. Additionally, Faculty who have systems or services that utilize perms will need to be evaluated to determine whether they will work with the proposed solution as-is, or if updates will be required to ensure the applications can work with a modified perm.

Based on feedback on the availability of systems to work with alphanumeric perms, we will make a decision as to whether to include all characters (A-Z), or a subset. We will take into consideration not using ambiguous characters to minimize confusion and data entry errors.

Though we have not gotten to these details yet, at this time, we do anticipate avoiding using X in the first character of any alphanumeric perms, so as to avoid this confusion. Based on further analysis, it is plausible we may ignore X entirely in any alphanumeric perms, as there may be other logic in various systems looking for an X in the student ID to make this delineation between UCSB and UCSB Extension student IDs.

Though we have not gotten to these details yet, at this time, we do not anticipate making the alphanumeric perms case-sensitive, since going with a non-case-sensitive alphanumeric perm will give us more than enough perm numbers to last us into the future.