While specialty occupation, wage level, and employer-employee issue RFEs have been all the rage since 2017, the classic 3-Year Degree H-1B RFE has not gone away. H-1B beneficiaries with 3-year bachelor’s degrees earned outside of the United States consistently receive RFEs and Denials for the missing fourth year of college.
Even though the Indian 3-year bachelor’s degree has the same – if not greater – amount of classroom contact hours as the US 4-year bachelor’s degree, beneficiaries with this degree are consistently hit the hardest.
If you, or if your employee or client has a 3-year bachelor’s degree, the petition will run into issues virtually every time unless you take the one preventative step that works. That means submitting a credential evaluation with the initial petition that includes a work experience conversion to account for the missing fourth year of college. With the evaluation, three years of progressive work experience in the field of the H-1B job can be converted into one year of college credit towards a major in that field provided the evaluation is written by a professor with the authority to issue college credit for work experience.
What is progressive work experience? For work experience to be considered progressive, it must be shown that throughout the duration of the job, the nature of the beneficiary’s work became increasingly complex with increasingly specialized skills. This shows that education and professional development occurred on the job.
The right credential evaluation must take the job, the education, and the nuances of H-1B visa requirements into consideration. If you call a credential evaluation agency and they do not ask about any one of these three factors, hang up and look elsewhere.
Submitting a credential evaluation with a work experience conversion with the initial petition is the best way to avoid these issues. If it’s too late and you’ve already received the RFE, including this evaluation and work experience conversion with the response is the best way to get that RFE overturned. At CCI TheDegreePeople.com we work with these cases every year, and our method of writing a credential evaluation with work experience conversion tailored to each beneficiary’s unique situation works virtually every time to get the RFE overturned.
If you, or if your employee or client has a 3-year bachelor’s degree, do not submit that petition or RFE response without the right credential evaluation and work experience conversion. Let us review your case for free. Visit www.ccifree.com and we will respond in 4 hours or less.
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the executive director of CCI, TheDegreePeople.com. She specializes in overturning RFEs and Denials for work visas.