About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI, TheDegreePeople.com, a foreign credentials evaluation agency. For a no-charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/?CodeBLG or call 800.771.4723.]]>
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st, there are only 65,000 annual H-1B visas available and literally hundreds of thousands of H-1B candidates applying for them. There is no annual cap for H-1B jobs in the non-profit sector or for government-funded research foundations, but these kinds of jobs do not cover the needs of the private STEM industry companies that need H-1B employees the most. Even companies like Microsoft tend to only get around half of the H-1B visas they petition for. If your company or your client’s company wants H-1B visa workers for 2017, it’s time to get those petitions ready. At TheDegreePeople.com, we understand that preparing a petition takes time and can become very stressful. Having an advanced degree from a country outside of the United States – particularly from countries like India that have three-year bachelor’s degrees instead of four-year degrees – can cause trouble. If your employee or client has a degree specialized in a field related to but not exactly matching their field of employ, this can also cause trouble. There are many reasons your client or employee’s education can cause confusion when their petition is filed. Everything from mistranslations to confusion about credit hours can trigger an RFE or a Denial for an over-qualified, clearly adept H-1B visa candidate. Making sure your client or employee submits an accurate credential evaluation that meets the requirements of his or her H-1B visa along with the rest of the petition on April 1st is an essential way to save you time NOW and save you more time LATER. Don’t wait for an RFE, Denial, or NOID to address your client or employee’s education. We offer a variety of low-cost rush delivery options for the last minute, no-cost consultations on your situation, and we can address your complicated cases quickly and successfully. About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/?CodeBLG/ or call 800.771.4723.]]>
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st. If the past several years are any indication of what is to come, you will only have a five-day window to get your client or employee’s petition in the H-1B lottery.
Before you even get started, there are two very important questions about whether or not the job and the employee are H-1B qualified you and your client or employee should be asking:
To qualify for H-1B visa status, the job must require a US bachelor’s degree or its equivalent or higher to show that the position requires the employee to possess specialized skills and knowledge to carry out successfully. Mid-sized companies in particular are asked to justify why someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher is required for the job, and you need to show this through evidence and documentation. For example, the ad for the job can be used as proof if it indicates that as a minimum qualification the employee must have a bachelor’s degree or higher. You can also show that similar jobs for similar companies also have these specialized requirements. However, if the job requires a generalized degree – even if it is a bachelor’s degree – you may run into problems because a generalized degree does not indicate that specialized knowledge and skills are required. This is where alternative forms of evidence, like expert opinion letters and examples of similar jobs for similar companies come in particular handy. It is on you to prove that you require a highly skilled employee with a specialized knowledge base to successfully carry out the duties of an H-1B job.
Say you’ve established that your company absolutely needs an employee with a bachelor’s degree or higher and a specialized knowledge base and skill set to carry out the duties of this H-1B position. NOW you need to show that your H-1B candidate is that employee with the required education and specialized knowledge base and skill set. How do you do this? If your candidate has a bachelor’s degree or higher from a US college or university with a major that is an exact fit for their field of employ, it is straightforward. If your candidate has a degree from a different country or with a major in a different field – even if it’s in a related field – from their field of employ, you will need to take one more step to meet this H-1B requirement.
CIS does not accept a three-year degree as the equivalent of a US four-year degree at face value. However, when evaluated for academic course content, an evaluation agency with the authority to convert classroom contact hours into college credit can use this technique to take a close look at your client or employee’s degree and bridge the missing year. An evaluator with the authority to convert years of work experience into college credit can follow the 3-1 rule and convert three years of progressive work experience in the field into one year of college credit. Both of these careful evaluation methods can also be utilized to show specialization in the candidate’s field of employ if they have worked in the field or taken enough classes throughout their college career in that field.
Don’t wait until it’s too late to get started on your employee or client’s H-1B petition. This is US immigration, which means it’s a bundle of details and documentation that often takes time and energy to get in order. If your client or employee needs a credential evaluation to show that they meet CIS educational requirements, start looking for the right credential evaluation agency to meet your needs. The right agency should be able to right an evaluation as unique as your client’s education, and they should have a firm understanding of CIS trends and the different academic requirements for different visas.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI, TheDegreePeople.com, a foreign credentials evaluation agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723.
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About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com, a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723.]]>
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progressive work experience, the nature of the work must have required you to take on progressively more work and responsibilities representing your progressively growing specialized knowledge base and skill set. Don’t wait for an RFE or Denial to get your degree and work experience evaluated. While an RFE or Denial is not the end of the world, it is a big red flag to CIS that will trigger a close scrutiny of your petition. Minor errors and glitches that would have otherwise gone unnoticed will be unearthed because attention has been drawn to your petition. With hundreds of thousands of H1B Visa petitions to mire through, CIS uses red flags to make the hard decision of who gets their Visa approved and who does not for the set amount of annual Visa slots. Make the decision to approve your Visa easy by making your specialized knowledge and skill set clear with a credential evaluation from a professor authorized to convert work experience into college credit. About the Author Sheila Danzig Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723. Mention that you saw this in the ILW article and get 72 hour rush service at no charge. ]]>
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One common occurrence in which this is the case is the Chartered Accountancy certification from India. With an evaluation and a detailed expert opinion letter, the Indian Chartered Accountancy Certificate can be shown equivalent to a US Bachelor’s degree. While this certification is evaluated to be the equivalent of a US bachelor’s degree with a major in Accounting, the Chartered Accountancy certification from Canada is not. Similar certifications in different countries evaluate to different equivalencies in terms of the value of US education. How can this be?
The answer is not determined by which evaluator you go to, and will not change from one agency to the next. The equivalency answer is based on equivalencies in the home countries of the holders of these certificates. In India, the Chartered Accountancy certification is the result of post-secondary education and passing examinations that have prerequisites of post-secondary education. The Canadian Chartered Accountancy certification is a professional certification, but not post-secondary education. How does one discern the difference between what is post-secondary education and what is not? The way to evaluate these certifications – or, in the case of the Indian Chartered Accountancy certification, degrees that don’t call themselves degrees – is to look at the stages of education required to complete that certification, and the post-graduate education and professions that certification meets the prerequisite standards of.
It looks like this:
To hold an Indian Chartered Accountancy certification, a person must have completed a program of education that culminates in the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (IACI) formal examination. To take this examination, a candidate must have passed the PE-II Intermediate examination and have 2.5 years of practical training. To take the PE-II, an Indian bachelor’s degree or the equivalent of the PE-I is necessary. Therefore, if a candidate holds an Indian Chartered Accountancy certification, the education required to get there is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.
In 2007, the AAO agreed in their decision that states, “Passage of the ICAI final examination and obtaining associate membership in the ICAI is the foreign equivalent to a US bachelor’s degree in Accounting.”
Even difficult degrees – and degrees that don’t call themselves degrees – can be understood when broken down into the steps and prerequisites necessary to obtain them.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723. Mention that you saw this in the ILW article and get 72 hour rush service at no charge.
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What does the Matter of Shah have to do with any of this?
The decision to this matter, made in 1977, is the most widely cited reason the USCIS and their evaluation board gives for issuing an RFE or rejecting a visa petition outright. In this decision, it was determined that the candidate, who held a three-year Indian bachelor’s degree with chemistry as a special subject from Gujarat University and a two-year MBA from the University of Detroit was not academically qualified for a job in the United States as a chemist. The candidate had never been employed in the field of chemistry, which also weighed into the decision in the Matter of Shah.
To this day – almost 40 years later – this decision is given as grounds to bar countless qualified candidates from the visas they deserve based on a three-year degree not being equivalent to a US four-year degree. Is this decision solid grounds for denial?
No. Here is why:
First, the board that made the decision in the Matter of Shah never actually made a complete analysis of the candidate’s education. The decision was based on analysis of just the second year of the candidate’s three-year undergraduate transcripts. With only one year to consider, the board had no way of discerning the actual academic content of the candidate’s degree. That would require looking at the total number of classroom contact hours and academic rigor of all three years of the candidate’s undergraduate study. This means that they actual academic value of the candidate’s education was never actually taken into accurate consideration in this decision. In the verbatim of the board’s decision, it was even stated that a US four-year bachelor’s degree requires “usually” four years of study. “Usually” means that sometimes it is more and sometimes it is less. The US four-year degree requires a minimum of 1800 classroom contact hours to graduate.
Former Professor of Physics at the University of Mumbai, Gulab Vaswani reports, “Every three-year bachelor’s degree program in India has more than 2000 contact hours with some having more than 3000.”
At the same time, the board never analyzed the proportion of the candidate’s study devoted to chemistry. Therefore, the decision that the candidate did not meet the academic qualifications for the job of chemist was also misinformed.
Which leads right into the second reason the Matter of Shah should not matter.
The candidate had earned a three-year degree from an accredited university with chemistry as a special subject. The word “Special” was never determined in the board’s decision. Credential evaluators across the country have found time and again that a “special” subject in an Indian three-year degree is the academic equivalent of a “major” subject in a US four-year degree. This means that the special subject has equal to or more credit hours than that same subject as a major in a US four-year undergraduate program. Therefore, the candidate did in fact major in chemistry in the Matter of Shah.
Even though the board did not recognize the value of the candidate’s undergraduate degree, the University of Detroit certainly did. In fact, the university admitted the candidate into their MBA program based on the three-year Indian bachelor’s degree being the equivalent of the US four-year bachelor’s degree necessary to gain entrance into that very program. The fact that the candidate went on to successfully complete the two-year MBA program goes to show that the Indian three-year degree with chemistry as a special subject really did qualify the candidate for the graduate program.
Finally, the last reason I will go into for why the Matter of Shah should not be grounds for denying anyone’s visa is that in making the decision, the board overturned a previous ruling. This ruling was made by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and can be found in Appendix 5-F, pages 34-37 of the Immigrant Inspector’s Handbook. In this ruling, the department stated that a B.S. degree in chemistry from the candidate’s university, Gujarat University, is the equivalent of a United States B.S. degree.
The Matter of Shah has its foundation in four errors:
The Matter of Shah should not serve as a roadblock to Visa approval. Unfortunately, almost forty years later, it still does. If your client or employee received an RFE about their three-year bachelor’s degree, you need to provide a credential evaluation that includes a refutation of the Matter of Shah. As you can see, refuting the Matter of Shah as grounds for a decision about the value of a three-year Indian bachelor’s degree or specialization is not difficult to do in a credential evaluation. However, the evaluator you select must be well versed in USCIS and immigration precedents, and be able to provide the documentation that highlights these points of refutation.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800 771 4723
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