Foreign Credential Evaluation in the United States: Part 2

By Holly O’Neill West      

Complications & Confusion

If all of this sounds rather confusing so far, you’re right. Since there is no government agency that oversees the evaluation of foreign credentials in the U.S., not all services operate in the same way. In addition, not all services use the same criteria for evaluating credentials. That is, you might get different educational equivalencies for the same credential, depending upon which credential evaluation service you decide to submit your documents to. Furthermore, many colleges and universities in the United States perform their own credential evaluations, and the criteria for admission to one institution might be vastly different than that of another.

Example:
My husband has a bachelor’s degree from a recognized university in the UK, while his business partner completed a Higher National Diploma (HND) program in the UK. Both were recruited to come to the U.S. to work in the computer games industry, and in order to obtain their Visas (H1-B and J-1), both needed a foreign credential evaluation. The same evaluation service completed both evaluations, and both received U.S. bachelor’s degree equivalencies.

This is all well and good, except for two things. The first is that in the UK, the HND is not considered to be at the same level as a bachelor’s degree. If a person who completed an HND wants to transfer to a university level program in the UK, they will generally be admitted to the second year of a bachelor’s degree program at a UK university. Based on this information, is it really proper to equate these two credentials to the same thing in the U.S.?

The second problem is that there really isn’t an academic program in the U.S. that is comparable to the HND. For this reason, evaluators will often interpret it differently, depending upon the policies of the individual office. The credential evaluation service that completed these evaluations equated the HND to a U.S. bachelor’s degree, however, the evaluation service I worked for would have equated it to completion of three years of university level coursework in the U.S. Is one service right and the other wrong? No, not necessarily. Each service took the information available about the HND and interpreted it in a different way, but neither is more correct than the other.

To complicate the situation further, let’s say that my husband’s partner decides he wants to further his education in the U.S., so he applies for a master’s degree program. Don’t forget that he has already worked in the U.S. for almost 10 years as a “bachelor’s degree equivalent,” which should mean that he has, at least on a basic level, fulfilled the requirements for admission into a master’s degree program in the U.S. As part of the application process, the admissions office at the university completes an evaluation of his HND and determines that he does not have the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree and that he will have to transfer into a U.S. bachelor’s degree program, requiring at least two years of additional requirements (what with general university program requirements and courses specific to the field of study).

This situation is not at all uncommon, and in my career as an evaluator, I had to explain the reasons for it to angry clients more often than I care to remember. Welcome to the world of foreign credential evaluation

Useful Resources

College Admissions
Chronicle of Higher Education
EAIE:  European Association for International Educators
NAFSA:  Association of International Educators
National Association of Credentials Evaluation Services
TOEFL Online - Test of English as a Foreign Language
US Department of Postsecondary Education

Holly O’Neill West worked as a foreign credential evaluator for a Los Angeles-based credential evaluation service for almost ten years. During that time, she wrote monographs on the educational systems of Afghanistan, Sudan, and Zambia, and contributed to “A Guide to Educational Systems Around the World” by co-writing the profile on Brazil. Her experience as an evaluator and her marriage to a British national have convinced her that immigration to the U.S. can be an inconvenient process at best and heartbreaking at worst. Her hope is that the work she did as a foreign credential evaluator helped to make the road a bit easier for at least some immigrants to this country. She is now employed as a web designer.