There are many situations in which H1B candidates will file with education from an unaccredited institution.
Plenty of academically competitive institutions of education that are held in high regard by the professional fields their students are trained in, that provide students with high quality education that are simply not government accredited. Graduates of programs from these schools are prepared to work highly specialized H1B jobs, but CIS will not approve their visas outright because the school their degree is from is not government accredited.
Sometimes, candidates will not know that their school was not government accredited. Sometimes a credential evaluator will not know that a school is not accredited and not take that into account when writing a credential evaluation. For these reasons, H1B candidates get education RFEs this time of year.
If you or your employee or client received an H1B RFE for having the right degree from the wrong institution, you may be able to get that RFE overturned. The question is, does the candidate have the progressive work experience necessary to account for the missing degree?
At TheDegreePeople.com, we work with these kinds of cases regularly. We recently had a client come to us with an RFE for an unaccredited institution and we were able to get the RFE overturned with a credential evaluation that included a work experience conversion. It works like this:
CIS accepts that three years of progressive work experience in your client’s field can be converted into one year of college credit with a major in that field in a credential evaluation, so long as a professor with the authority to grant college credit for work experience signs off on this conversion. Progressive work experience means that throughout the candidate’s time on the job, he or she took on progressively more responsibility, and the nature of the duties of the job became increasingly specialized and complex indicating that education occurred on the job.
If you or your employee or client is in this situation, twelve years of progressive work experience is needed to write the evaluation to get this RFE overturned.
Not sure if you, your client, or your employee qualifies? Let us review your case for free. Simply go to ccifree.com/ and submit the candidate’s accurate, updated resume, and indicate the H1B job. We will get back to you within 24 hours with a pre-evaluation and full analysis of your situation and all of your options.