I have a student who has an engineering degree from Lima, Peru. Right now she is working for minimum wage because the degree has not been translated and recognized in the US. What steps would she need to take to get this degree recognized?
She needs to have her degree evaluated for equivalency. Engineering degrees tend to be very demanding in Peru and require a thesis for licensing. A friend had his civil engineering degree from Peru evaluated w/ licensing thesis and was awarded masters degree equivalency. He did that by an agency that was accepted by the American Embassy in Lima for visa purposes. I think WES and ECE offer that service. I would stronly recommend her to do that.
Another way, assuming your student is in the USA, is for her to sign up for a masters degree. This will accomplish two things: (1) The college/school will evaluate her degree (2) She can then list the masters (in progress) on her resume. In my experience (in aerospace industry) most HR departments can translate/evaluate a foreign degree. The degree is somewhat incidental to her experience and capabilities. At my last employer (a major US aerospace company) 8 years experience was deemed equivalent to a bachelors degree. What kind of engineering degree does your student have (mech, civil, elect, etc)? And what is her career goal?
I'd doubt most schools would evalutate her foreign degree. They would most likely require it to be done by ECE or similar as well, it's usually listed on most University sites foreign student pages.
I got a question in line with the original poster. So I just thought I jump in here bevore starting a new topic: Is there any way to evaluate a foreign degree through one of the agencies and then get one of the big 3 to accept this as credits towards a degree?
you would need a course by course evaluation to do that. Check with the university in question before having the evaluation done. Most universities have a list of whom they accept evaluations from. Some some universties do their own evalautions as well so it is best to check first.
I've seen it done both ways. At CSUDH several fellow students had foreign university degrees (UK and South Africa) - the major issue was that they were three year degrees - initially rejected by the admissions department but later approved on appeal when it was pointed out that certain high school certificates were community college level (GCE A levels for example) - no external evaluation was involved. For my BS at Excelsior it was required that my non-degree college credits be evaluated by ECE. Funny thing was ECE denied some high level courses but over credited me on other courses. Net outcome I was happy to receive more credit than I requested.
