Foreign Credential Evaluation Services - Improve Your Success
The United States of America has a foreign credential evaluation service. This agency is responsible for looking at the education people have gained at foreign institutions in order to provide U.S equivalence. This is used when people are immigrating, looking to get licensed in the U.S or attempting to further their education.
Despite it being a relatively unknown field, the field of foreign credential evaluation is growing rapidly, and it has evolved a great deal over the past thirty years. In the start, educational equivalencies in the U.S. were usually determined by counting the number of years a person had studied in a foreign country and then comparing it to the level of education a student would have completed in the same number of years in the United States. This, of course, is not accurate.
Very little amount of regard have been given to education studied annually. Unlike in the US, in most countries the students attend twice as many hours or more of their classes. Over a span of years, the methods used to evaluate foreign education credentials precisely have become something more increasingly difficult.
The job of evaluating foreign credentials used to be spearheaded by the Foreign Credential Evaluation Service. The FCES was shortened in the late 1960s and then terminated in 1970. Now there are no national standards in place in the United States when it comes to evaluating foreign educational credentials.
After 1970 there have not been any kind of official, binding guidelines when it comes to evaluating foreign educational credentials. It is generally left up to private credential evaluation services or even left to the colleges and universities themselves. An agency called UNESCO provides international guidelines that are in many cases legally binding but they have been known to be ignored.
It should be said that the Council has been in existence since 1955 and their principles generally carry a great deal of weight with many institutions and organizations within the United States. Private evaluation groups, colleges and universities make their own judgment guidelines and many of these are based somewhat upon those made by the Council. In addition, they are helpful in cases of immigration and employment purposes. UNESCO guidelines should be more influential but for unknown reasons most agencies ignore them, even though they are the only ones that are legally-binding.
Most people are unaware of the field known as foreign credential evaluation service. This is a formal effort to perform foreign academic degree evaluation, assessing the relationship of various international credentials to the prevailing academic standards in the United States. These results are then used for immigration and employment purposes. Other uses include professional licensing and academic evaluation. Originally handled in this country directly by the government, this is now left up to private industry or to institutions directly. A major influence, however,are the UNESCO guidelines, which carry a lot of weight in the field. In many cases these are even legally binding.
Published May 9th, 2008
Filed in Government
