Starting Tuesday, March 21, high quantities of alphanumeric perms, six-character identifiers consisting of both letters and numbers, will enter various campus systems after newly admitted students begin submitting their Statement of Intent to Register (SIR).
This effort will NOT impact students currently or previously enrolled at UCSB. All existing (all-numeric) perms will continue to work as they always have.
In July 2022, the Perm Augmentation team announced that future UCSB applicants and students would be assigned alphanumeric perms after an analysis conducted in 2019 revealed that UCSB is running out of available all-numeric perms. Although alphanumeric perms were first piloted in a small capacity across campus systems in September 2022, the volume of perm numbers with this new format is expected to increase starting next week.
We expect to see alphanumeric perms printed on physical access cards as early as Monday, March 27. Please review the D-list memo shared on December 6, 2022, for information about access card changes that recently went into effect in order to support alphanumeric perms.
More information, including details about perm structure, excluded characters, and other frequently asked questions, is available on the Perm Augmentation Project webpage. Please email perm@sa.ucsb.edu if you have any questions or concerns.