H1B Without Bachelor Degree

Under normal circumstances, you would have a U.S. four-year bachelor’s degree, or if your degree is not from the U.S., it would be a degree that’s equivalent to a four-year U.S. bachelor’s degree. If you don’t have the four-year bachelor’s degree, you can use a formula that’s allowed under us immigration law.

3:1 Formula

And that formula is three years of work experience is equal to one year of college credit. So three years of work experience equals one year of college credit. If you have 12 years of experience, that’s equal to a four-year bachelor’s degree under U.S. immigration law.

Experience Letter

Now, what you have to do is you have to contact your current employer or your previous employers, and have them write your dates of employment. The dates that you worked for your company, and they also need to provide a job description (employment verification letter/experience letter).

The more detailed the job description in the letter, the better. Then what you want to do is you want to take that job description and give it to an evaluations company that is a professional organization that meets certain requirements set by USCIS, in order to provide the evaluation. That evaluation company will look at the experience letters, and they will state that based on what’s written in the experience letter, the experience qualifies as a four-year bachelor’s degree. And if that is the case, then you can use that equivalency to apply for the H1B application.

You might get a Request For Evidence (RFE)

Now, you have to remember that these experience letters are a little bit iffy from the immigration side as far as USCIS accepting the letters and the evaluation. It’s not impossible to get them approved. They’re certainly approvable, but just expect that USCIS will give this application more scrutiny.  If it’s not based on a degree from a conferring institution, like a university or a college, you might, you might expect to get an RFE on this type of case, but it’s not impossible to get it approved.

Permutations allowed

So that’s another way to get an H1B visa if you don’t have your four-year bachelor’s degree. And also let me throw in that, let’s say, if you have a two-year associates degree, you could combine that two year associate’s degree with six years of experience, and, that way get the equivalent of a four year bachelor’s degree as well. So you can use permutations. You don’t need to have no college credit and go for the 12 years. You could do it based on having six years of experience or potentially three years of experience, and then throwing in your, college coursework in order to make the equivalent of the four year bachelor’s degree.

I hope that’s helpful. Take care.