Need Help?
Message Sheila D, Executive Director with any questions
9544450107

three-year bachelor’s degree

Everything You Need to Know about H1B RFEs for 3-Year Degrees

Credential Evaluation, Immigration

One of the very most common H1B RFE triggers is a 3-year bachelor’s degree with no credential evaluation, or with the wrong kind of credential evaluation.

Many H1B candidates come to the United States to work missing a fourth year of education. The Indian 3-year Bachelor’s degree is the most common 3-year degree to trigger an RFE because there are only twelve years of pre-college education rather than thirteen. Although 3-year degrees from India tend to have even more classroom contact hours than the US 4-year bachelor’s degree, CIS is hung up on that missing fourth year.

If you or your employee or client has an Indian 3-year bachelor’s degree and you submitted the H1B petition without a credential evaluation, chances are you received an RFE regarding the candidate’s education. Even if you did submit a credential evaluation with the petition, you may have received an RFE anyway, and here’s why:

Every visa has particular regulations surrounding what CIS will and will not accept for educational equivalencies. In addition, CIS approval trends change year to year. For example, in the past, we could write a classroom clock hours conversion breaking down the number of hours students spend in class for an Indian 3-year Bachelors degree. Then, we would use the Carnegie Unit conversion which converts fifteen hours of classroom contact hours into 1 hour of college credit. A US 4-year Bachelor’s degree contains a minimum of 120 credit hours. If the 3-year degree contained at least this many credit hours, the equivalency would work. This is not the case anymore.

Now, the right credential evaluation for an H1B candidate’s 3-year degree uses a work experience conversion to account for the missing fourth year. CIS is VERY focused on that missing fourth year of education regardless of the intensity of education.

Here’s how it works:

Three years of progressive work experience in the field of your or your employee or client’s H1B job can be converted into one year of college credit. In this work experience, the candidate must have taken on more responsibility and tasks of greater specialization while at this job, proving that education occurred on the job. This conversion must be written by a professor authorized to grant college credit for work experience. At TheDegreePeople.com, we always have authorized professors on staff available to write these evaluations.

If you or your employee or client received an RFE for a 3-year degree, don’t get too far on your response without a full analysis of your situation and all of your options moving forward. Let us review the case. Simply go to ccifree.com and submit all of the educational documents and a current, accurate resume and we will get back to you within 24 hours with your pre-evaluation, full analysis, and all of your options.

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, RE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723.]]>

Everything You Need to Know about H1B RFEs for 3-Year Degrees Read More »

Everything You Need to Know about Three-Year Bachelors Degrees and H1B Filing

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals


CIS will NOT accept the Indian three-year bachelor’s degree alone as adequate evidence that you or your employee or client meets H1B educational requirements.

It doesn’t matter that Indian three-year bachelor’s degrees contain just as many if not more credit hours as the US four-year bachelor’s degree. It doesn’t matter that many prominent British and US universities accept Indian students into Master’s programs with three-year bachelor’s degrees. It doesn’t matter what international trade agreements and international education analysis has to say about the academic value of an Indian three-year bachelor’s degree.

The bottom line is CIS is hung up on missing year number four, and to get your or your employee or client’s H1B visa approved, that fourth year needs to be accounted for.

Here’s how:

If you or your employee or client has three years of progressive work experience in the field of his or her H1B job, a university or college professor with the authority to issue college credit for work experience can grant one year of college credit for those three years of work experience. How can you tell if you or your employee or client has “progressive” work experience? Throughout the years of work experience, you or your employee or client must have taken on more responsibility and complexity in the work performed, indicating that education specialized to the field occurred through this work experience.

Before your file, take your or your employee or client’s transcripts and work experience to a credential evaluation agency for review. This agency must be experienced working with H1B visas and their RFEs, and have professors authorized to grant college credit for work experience on hand to write the credential evaluation. If the agency does not ask the visa or your client’s job, look elsewhere. You need to find an agency that understands the nuances of H1B visa requirements to get the results you need.

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/ or call 800.771.4723.

 

 ]]>

Everything You Need to Know about Three-Year Bachelors Degrees and H1B Filing Read More »

Case Study: Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree Denial Successfully Answered

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals


CIS is notoriously finicky about accepting a three-year bachelor’s degree as the equivalent of a US four-year bachelor’s degree, particularly Indian three-year bachelor’s degrees. Because CIS did not recognize the three-year bachelor’s degree as the equivalent of a US four-year bachelor’s degree, and because that degree was a prerequisite to the master’s program, CIS deemed that the master’s degree was not, in fact, equivalent to a US master’s degree.

When our client filed, he received a Denial. That’s when he came to us. In this situation, the evaluator has two options to show that the three-year bachelor’s degree – and thus the two-year master’s degree – meets its US equivalent.

First, we could break down the classroom contact hours in a three-year bachelor’s degree and apply the Carnegie Unit conversion in which fifteen classroom contact hours is the equivalent of one college credit hour. The standard US four-year bachelor’s degree has 120 college credit hours. Since the vast majority of Indian three-year degrees are comprised of at least 1800 classroom contact hours, the conversion shows that there are more than enough college credit hours in a three-year degree to be the equivalency of a US four-year degree.

In addition to this detailed breakdown of the academic content of the three-year degree, we would also cite binding UNESCO instruments, as well as numerous three-year bachelor’s degrees that can be earned in the United States. In addition, we would provide a list of US master’s degree programs – including programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Wharton – that accept an Indian three-year bachelor’s degree as an adequate prerequisite to these master’s degree programs to prove the functional equivalency of the client’s bachelor’s degree as a step in obtaining a master’s degree. Along with all of this documentation, we would provide 400 more pages of documentation we have gathered showing how a three-year degree is the equivalent of a US four-year bachelor’s degree, and also discuss the Matter of Shah – a case that CIS depends on to invalidate three-year bachelor’s degrees. The Matter of Shah is not an accurate instrument to determine the value of a three-year degree for many reasons.

Our second option has a higher success rate than the first option, and is in most cases the method of approach we will take. Using the method about to be explained, we have seen a 95% approval rate with three-year degrees for EB2 visas.

In this second method is a two-step process. First, we would write an evaluation to show how three years of undergraduate education with and additional two years of graduate school are equivalent to a US bachelor’s degree. We can do this without it being considered combining education. PERM requirements clearly state that the bachelor’s degree must be a single source, and we can meet these requirements with this method by citing appropriate memos. The next step is to show how five years of progressive work experience in our client’s field of employ is equivalent to a US master’s degree. We can do this by citing federal case law.

If the second option works so much better, why would we ever use the first option? The first option is well accepted for EB3 visas, but tends to only work half of the time for EB2. However, if a client does not have a master’s degree, or the client’s attorney specifically requests we go that route, that is the route we will take. Every case is different, and every client and their education is different.

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.]]>

Case Study: Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree Denial Successfully Answered Read More »

Scroll to Top