You’ve earned a foreign degree at the Bachelor or graduate level, and want to apply for an immigration visa to the United States. To apply for an employment-based visa, you must prove that your education is the U.S. equivalency required for the labor certificate. How do you know if your degree will hold up to examination?

First, check the UNESCO database at  http://www.unesco.org/iau/onlinedatabases/list.html . If your university is listed here, your degree will probably be recognized as accredited education by the U.S. Department of Education. This is the educational authority recognized as well by USCIS. Some universities, such as some accredited institutions within the United Kingdom, can be located at other websites as well.

Sometimes, a private educational institution or university operating within a particular country will be recognized as accredited education as well. These foreign academic credentials may be issued by a private university or by that country’s department or ministry of education. For example, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India is an educational institution established by that country’s statutes and passing those examinations can yield the U.S. equivalency of a degree as well.

Determining whether some foreign diplomas, such as certain postgraduate diplomas offered in some countries, are accredited can be a difficult process. For this reason, many foreign academic credentials evaluation agencies, including Career Consulting International, offers pre-evaluation reports. These can be used to offer students an idea of whether their education can indeed be evaluated as the international equivalency of an accredited degree.

Not all diplomas do meet U.S. requirements for accredited education, and extenuating circumstances apply. For this reason, the USCIS generally requires persons who have obtained their degrees outside the U.S. to have an educational evaluation performed before an employment-based visa is issued. Do your homework, and get your degree evaluated so you will know whether your diploma will make the grade!

Recently, we had the pleasure of hearing from a very satisfied customer that his immigrant visa had been approved. We were glad to hear about this, and glad that he had contacted us to share the good news.

Our client had applied for and received EB-2 approval with a 3-year degree and 2-year postgraduate degree. CCI has been fortunate to have considerable success in approval rates for these educational evaluations. While USCIS has made approval of 3-Year Degrees from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh much more challenging, we have been able to supply sufficient documentation to show that these degrees are in fact the international equivalency of a U.S. Bachelor Degree.

Through our foreign education credential evaluations process, we are able to determine quickly whether a person’s foreign degree is equivalent to accredited education within the United States. Often, clients submit their documents to us for a low-cost pre-evaluation, which helps us to determine what type of evaluation and/or expert opinion will best meet that person’s needs. Our goal is to provide the timeliest, most economical, most effective evaluation report possible for each client.

If your evaluation has helped you gain approval for a visa, for university admission, or for employment, we would love to hear from you. Just register and post on our guest blog, or contact us and share your success story. We won’t use your name or any identifying information unless you specifically approve it. Share your feedback and make your voice heard.

Foreign credential evaluation agencies can be expensive, and paying the cost of a professional translator may seem like an added, unnecessary expense. It may seem just as convenient to have a “friend” translate, or find someone who agrees to translate it for a very small fee. After all, what difference can one or two little words make?

In fact, even a single word or letter can be critical to a favorable educational evaluation. For example, the misalignment of a single column can result in the wrong grade for a course, or the wrong number of credits being assigned to a course. Likewise, being unfamiliar with advanced terms in course subjects, an inexperienced translator could assign a key mathematics course as algebra rather than calculus, which could be very detrimental for the student with a foreign degree.

Many immigration attorneys and foreign education credential evaluation services, such as Career Consulting International, work with translator services on a regular basis. While these agencies do not require people seeking U.S. equivalencies for their diplomas to use a particular translator, they are able to recommend high quality companies that have historically offered high quality translations. Furthermore, their professional reports leave no room for clerical errors.

The visa application process can be expensive and time-consuming. Frequently, people are in a hurry to have their visas approved for employment or education reasons. They have little time for making multiple corrections to evaluation reports that contain multiple errors as a result of erroneous translations. Taking a moment to carefully select a good professional translator can save a lot of future time and trouble. Spend the extra time with your family and friends, rather than making corrections and fielding the hassles caused by poor translations.

Usually, most people in the United States think of immigrant visas as “green cards,” documents that allow people from foreign countries to remain in the United States and work. Another very different type of visa, however, is granted to workers who desire to work in the U.S. for a time, but have expressed no desire to actually immigrate. Approximately 85,000 of these visas, known as H1-B visas, were issued to foreign citizens in 2008.

Professionals who hold these visas work in specialty occupations and have the U.S. equivalency of at least a bachelor degree in at least one specified discipline, such as science, the arts, theology, health or education. Several other specialty fields are included in this classification. For a complete list, consult the USCIS website.

In order to demonstrate that their foreign degrees or diplomas are equal to a U.S. degree, most workers are required to obtain an equivalency evaluation from a foreign credentials evaluation agency, such as Career Consulting International. This is particularly true for individuals from countries such as India, Pakistan, and some European Countries who hold 3-year degrees. These credential evaluations are also used for other purposes such as education and immigration, in the event that a person desires to apply for permanent resident status.

Generally, people who hold H1-B visas are allowed to remain in this country for three years after obtaining the visa. These visas can be renewed one time, and allow a person to remain in the U.S. as a temporary worker for up to six years total. Individuals interested in staying longer or becoming permanent residents should consider applying for I-140 status instead.

The professionals at Career Consulting International are strongly committed to their clients’s successes. We are thrilled to hear when a client has received approval for immigration visas because it means that we have been able to help one more person in a difficult situation.

One of our goals is to communicate these successes to others, so that other people who have foreign degrees will be encouraged to know about these successful visa applications. If you have had a successful application for an H1-B Visa, an I-140, an EB Visa, or a TN Visa through our consultation services, please write us and tell us about your experience. We want to be able to encourage others through spreading the news of your success. We won’t use your name unless you give us permission.

We recently had the pleasure of learning from a person living in Nebraska who successfully applied for an EB-2. This person’s case involved a 3-Year Degree. The individual was unable to produce mark sheets for the transcripts. Despite this, we were able to offer an evaluation report that helped to gain approval.

We care deeply about the outcomes of our clients’ applications, and work hard to ensure every chance of success. Help us to spread the news by sharing your story today!