A recurring RFE we see every year with H-1B candidates is the education RFE for the Indian three-year bachelor’s degree. Candidates who do not submit credential evaluations that account for the missing fourth year of education with their initial petition get RFEs about it this time of year.
Graduate schools commonly accept the Indian three-year bachelor’s degree as an acceptable prerequisite to their programs, and employers will hire employees to specialty occupations with this credential. International trade and labor agreements recognize the Indian three-year bachelor’s degree as the functional equivalency of a US four-year bachelor’s degree. The number of actual classroom contact hours and college credit hours in an Indian three-year degree is equal to or greater than the 120 college credit hours that make up the US four-year bachelor’s degree. For all of these reasons, H-1B candidates and their teams overlook the persistent USCIS approval trend of NOT APPROVING beneficiaries with just this credential.
The best way to both prevent and answer this RFE is to include a detailed credential evaluation that accounts for the missing fourth year of education. Regardless of how many college credit hours this three-year program actually has, USCIS is hung up on that missing fourth year, and USCIS is the gatekeeper of your visa, or your employee or client’s visa.
At CCI TheDegreePeople.com, we rely on the work experience conversion option in these credential evaluations to account for the missing fourth year. USCIS accepts that three years of progressive work experience in the field of the H-1B job is the equivalent to one year of college credit in that major. You must prove that you, or your employee or client took on progressively more responsibility as time went on, and that the nature of the work increased in complexity. Then, one of our professors at TheDegreePeople.com with the authority to issue college credit for work experience, will write this conversion and it will be included in the credential evaluation. This evaluation will show USCIS that you DO have, or your employee or client DOES have the academic equivalent of a US four-year bachelor’s degree in the field of the H-1B job.
If you have, or if your employee or client has an education RFE for an Indian three-year bachelor’s degree, we can help get it overturned. For a free consultation, visit ccifree.com/?CodeLWA/. We will get back to you in 48 hours or less.
