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Answering an H1B RFE: Beware of Education Traps!

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals


If you or your employee or client fell into an H1B education trap, you need to understand what happened and how you can fix it when answering the RFE. Below we will look at some common H1B traps and how to climb your way out of them.

Badly Translated Transcripts

When you submit an H1B petition, CIS requires all educational documents be translated into English and evaluated for US academic equivalence. Some degrees simply don’t translate directly into English. At the same time, many degrees do translate directly into English when it comes to the wording, but the degree has an entirely different academic content. This is why degrees must be translated AND evaluated, and these are both highly specialized fields. Sometimes translation agencies overstep their scope of practice and make educational value judgments along with language translation. This is a major H1B education trap that has become more and more treacherous as some translation agencies have begun to market their services as a “one-shop stop” for translation and evaluation. Credential evaluation must be carried out on a case-by-case basis because every pathway through learning is unique, every institution is unique, and every country has a unique structure. An evaluator must be knowledgeable about these differences, as well as federal case law, CIS precedents, degree program admissions requirements, and international trade agreements to write an accurate evaluation of your degree, or your employee or client’s degree. Translation agencies simply do not have this expertise and instead turn to conservative equivalency databases like EDGE, which is not actually a standardized equivalency database as no such database actually exists.

If you or your employee or client received an RFE as the result of a bad translation, talk to a credential evaluation agency that works regularly with H1B RFE cases. A skilled evaluator can spot a bad translation and evaluate accordingly.

The degree is not from a government-accredited institution.

The fact is, there are plenty of institutions around the world that offer rigorous education programs that fully prepare workers for highly specialized occupations that are not actually government accredited. That means that even though you or your employee or client may have a legitimate education from an institution held in high regard by your industry, or your employee or client’s industry, the institution itself may not be government accredited and CIS will not approve the visa.

This is an RFE trap that you may or may not be able to wriggle free of. If you have, or if your employee or client has years of progressive work experience in the field of their specialty occupation, a credential evaluator with the authority to convert years of work experience into college credit to write a US bachelor’s degree equivalency CIS will accept. It’s always best to find whether or not this will work BEFORE you file the petition, but even if you fell into this H1B trap for FY2017 you may still be able to answer the RFE and get the visa approved.

The Bachelor’s Degree is ACTUALLY just a high school diploma.

This happens more often than you may think. Mistaking a high school diploma for a Bachelor’s degree can happen as the result of cross-cultural misunderstandings, bad translations, and acting upon false information. H1B educational criteria require candidates to hold a US bachelor’s degree or higher, or its equivalent. A high school diploma – or the foreign equivalent of a US high school diploma – will not cut it.

If you or your employee or client fell into this H1B education trap, talk to a credential evaluator with experience working with H1B RFEs. If you have, or if your employee or client has any post-secondary education from an accredited institution, this can be counted towards a bachelor’s degree equivalency, along with any years of progressive work experience you have, or your employee or client has in the field of employ. This is a tough mistake to recover from, and you may even find out that you or your employee or client has been pursuing the wrong visa all along. However, there is still a chance that you can claw your way out of this H1B education trap.

About the Author 

Sheila Danzig

Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director at TheDegreePeople.com, a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a free analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723.

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Using Chartered Accountancy Certificate for EB2

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals


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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