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Visa Approvals

The Top 3 Reasons for Education H1-B RFEs

Credential Evaluation, Visa Approvals

http://discuss.ilw.com/content.php?4449-Article-You-Can-Beat-The-Nightmare-RFE-for-H1B-By-Sheila-Danzig. You CAN beat the “Nightmare” RFE, but why do it if you don’t have to? Don’t risk this “Nightmare” scenario. Get your credentials evaluated by an evaluation agency with the authority to convert work experience in your field of employ into college credit. Some agencies simply do not write these kinds of evaluations. When you talk to them on the phone, tell them that you need an education evaluation for an H1-B Visa petition. If they don’t ask about your job offer, look elsewhere. You need an evaluator knowledgeable about international education as well as CIS trends. 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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How to Bridge the Fatal Gaps Between Your Degree and Your H1B Job

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals

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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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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The Matter of Shah and Why it Should NOT Matter

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals

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:

  1. Incomplete evaluation of the academic content of the candidate’s degree.
  2. Failing to translate the term “Special” into US academic context.
  3. Ignoring the University of Detroit’s decision to admit the candidate into their graduate program based on the academic value of the candidate’s three-year Indian bachelor’s degree, as well as the candidate’s successful completion of the MBA.
  4. Overturning a previous ruling that determined that the candidate’s exact degree was the equivalent of a US four-year bachelor’s degree.

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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The H1B Nicknamed the Genius Visa H1B Visa Program Keeps US STEM Industries from Collapse

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals

Nicknamed the “Genius Visa,” holding an H1B visa enables foreign nationals with advanced degrees to live and work in the United States for up to six years. This Visa ensures that they get prevailing industry wages and benefits, and that the companies that hire H1B visa holders can take on these new hires without cutting into the wages and benefits of other employees. This Visa offers a unique opportunity for highly skilled workers to live and work in the United States long-term, with their families. It is a Visa of dual-intent, so while it is a non-immigrant Visa, H1B Visa holders can choose to pursue pathways to citizenship.

About 70% of all H1B Visas go to workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industries. Why is this?

“Science is the engine of prosperity,” Dr. Kaku explains. “The United States has the worst educational system known to science.”

Students in the United States are not graduating high school or even college with the math and science skills necessary to fill the growing number of high tech jobs in places like Silicon Valley. According to Dr. Kaku, Silicon Valley would not even exist without the H1B Visa program because people coming to the United States to work on these Visas fill the positions that create entire STEM industries. Wall Street Journal agrees that when it comes to the highest level jobs at the highest level technology companies, Americans simply are not qualified. H1B workers are needed to create jobs for US citizens in these same industries because high-level jobs are necessary to create lower-tiered jobs in the industry through which US citizens can develop expertise through industry experience. Without a doubt, the “genius visa” is the secret ingredient that keeps STEM industries in the United States from collapsing.

While it may come as a surprise to some that Silicon Valleys are popping up in countries like China and India, it actually makes all the sense in the world because these are the countries that the top-level Silicon Valley engineers and developers are coming from. School systems in these countries cultivate strong scientific minds, and the United States attracts them with the H1B Visa program.

STEM industries aren’t the only fields attracting foreign geniuses. Dr. Kaku reports that 50% of all PhD candidates in the United States are foreign born, building the backbone of graduate programs in the country. Without the H1B visa program, 50% of all PhD candidates in the United States simply would not exist.

To qualify for H1B Visa status, a candidate must hold an advanced degree in a specialized field. That means having earned a bachelor’s degree or higher in a specialized field that matches their field of employ. While this sounds straightforward, variance of academic structures across borders muddles the value of any given degree. H1B Visa candidates are running into trouble getting their Visas approved because employers understand the value of their foreign education, but the USICS needs the value clearly articulated in terms of US educational standards. Candidates with three-year bachelor’s degrees in particular are running into trouble. When a candidate files his or her H1B Visa petition, an evaluation of their foreign degree must be included.

“Credential evaluation is a highly specialized process,” explains International Education expert and credential evaluator Sheila Danzig. “When we evaluate foreign credentials for US equivalence, we have to take classroom contact hours, USCIS and other legal precedents, university admissions decisions, and documented investigations into foreign education equivalencies into account to clearly spell out the value of your education.”

Dr. Kaku’s and the Wall Street Journal’s observations about the state of the US educational system are clearly reflected in the demographics of high-level tech jobs. All the same, the H1B Visa program requires candidates to prove their genius to their employers and graduate programs, as well as the bureaucracies that approve their 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, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723.]]>

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Turning Work Experience into College Credit: How does THAT work?

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals


If your client has an Indian three-year degree, you need to anticipate this problem before the H1b petition is submitted. Even though it has been proven time and again that the academic content of the Indian three-year degree actually far surpasses the US four-year degree in terms of classroom contact hours and Carnegie units, it is on your client to account for that final fourth year to the USCIS. You have two options.

First, your credential evaluator can write a detailed evaluation of the academic content of your client’s degree.   That means breaking down classroom contact hours and converting them into US measurements of college credits, then comparing the number of credits needed to graduate with a US bachelor’s degree to the amount of credits your client has accumulated. This is a good option if your client has a degree in their field of employ. However, if their degree fails to exactly match their field of employ the USCIS still will not accept their qualification for the visa.

USCIS standards of educational requirements are more stringent than those of employers. While many employers understand that employees with degrees in fields related to their work usually possess the specialized skills and knowledge required to carry out their jobs. The USCIS, on the other hand, requires employees education EXACTLY meet their field of employment. That means, your client needs to not only bridge the gap in the years of education, but also the gap in specialization.

To do this, an authorized credential evaluator can convert years of work experience into college credit. Work experience must be in the exact field of employ to count these towards years of academic specialization, and it must also be progressive work experience. This means the nature of the work required your client to take on more and more work and responsibilities representative of their progressively specialized skills and knowledge in the field. A credential evaluation agency with the authority to convert work experience into college credit can do this. Typically, three years of progressive work experience in a field can be evaluated as equivalent to one year of college credit in that field.

Before we delve into this any further, this is NOT a DIY manual. You cannot make these work experience conversions on your own and expect the USCIS to just accept it. You must work with an experienced credential evaluator with the authority to make these conversions, as well as a track record of being able to successfully make these conversions.

Sheila Danzig is the director of Career Consulting International at www.TheDegreePeople.com, a foreign credential evaluation agency. They specialize in difficult cases and RFEs, Denials, NOIDs, 3-year degrees, etc. and offer a free review of all H1B, E2, and I140 education at http://www.ccifree.com/.]]>

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H1b Question – Which job offer has the most RFEs in 2015?

Credential Evaluation, Immigration, Visa Approvals

Why is this?  In their educational requirements policy, the USCIS states, “A generalized degree, absent specialized experience, is insufficient” to prove an H1b candidate is educationally qualified for their specialty occupation. For example, the USCIS cites, “Since there must be a close corollary between the required specialized studies and the position, the requirement of a degree of generalized title, such as business administration or liberal arts, without further specification, does not establish eligibility.” When one’s education does not work standing alone, an evaluator must include the candidate’s work experience to meet H1b requirements.  At the same time, the USCIS requires a candidate’s degree to specifically match their specialty occupation.  While employers will hire those with a degree in a field related to their job, the USCIS requires an exact match.  Which degree fits Computer Systems Analyst? Master of Computer Analysis is the ONLY standard degree we have seen that ​has​ not triggered​ an RFE for that job offer​. Some other degrees has “slid by” but we have seen RFEs for all of them.​ A US Bachelor’s of Computer Science Engineering or its equivalent even receives an RFE for being a “generalized” degree.  A bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences Analysis is an extremely rare degree in the United States, available only at colleges and universities with self-designed degrees. However with work experience you can have that equivalence.​ However, most candidates don’t have a Computer Sciences Analysis self-designed degree from a US school.  A Bachelor’s of Computer Analysis sh​ould be accepted by the USCIS if it is a four-year degree, however​ the BCA from India is a three-year degree. The solution?  An evaluator can add your client’s work experience to his or her education to show an ​equivalence to a US Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Sciences Analysis. Although rare this degree does exist, and more importantly it​ is accepted by the USCIS as fulfilling the requirements for a Computer Systems Analyst. While RFE’s are not the end of the world and can be addressed, they are also seen as red flags.  An RFE for an​ issue like education can draw attention to the small details of your client’s petition, which can lead to even bigger issues.  It is always better to prevent an RFE in the first place than to overturn one later. About the author  Sheila Danzig   ​Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director​ of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credential Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult cases, RFEs, Denials or NOIDS, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723.]]>

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