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Comment by lovamova | Hacker News Reader

I just found that the H1-B visa requires a bachelor's degree. You can't get work in the US if you're a talented designer or programmer and don't have a degree.

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Yep, this is a quite an annoyance for me.

To give you a little background : I'm a 20-year-old international student, currently pursuing a bachelor's degree at a US university, and have been employed full-time at a mid-sized software company in Silicon Valley as a UI engineer/backend developer for a year through the CPT program -- a program which basically allows international students to work at a company outside of the university as long as the line of work matches the major.

After several months of working there, my company showed interest in giving me an H1-B visa, which basically got me really excited as I, to be blunt, enjoy the work a whole lot more than college. I thought I could bypass the whole educational process and join the workforce directly. Turned out, I was wrong. When the company went through the visa process, they figured it's not possible to give out H1-B visa to foreigners without bachelor's degree. [1] It's possible to substitute the degree with I think ~7 years of professional work, but I have nowhere near that experience.

So here I am, trying to finish school as fast as I can.

[1] They just figured this out as they never offered visa to a degree-less foreign employee before.

The exact requirement is "bachelors degree or equivalent ". So if you have at least 5+ years of work experience in the specific field/employer, you might be able to get it. But yes, it is extremely tough to prove the *equivalent" part because it can mean anything.

Equivalent is 3 years of work for every one year of bachelors degree missing (so partially college helps)

This is a problem? If you really want to work in the US, getting a bachelor's degree is one of the easiest hurdles to cross!

Except that whole "paying for it thing", there are very very few grants/scholarships for international students and they pay out-of-state fees plus a little more for being foreigners. Plus, outside of CPT you're not allowed to work in the US (only 20hrs max, on campus employment is allowed, if you can get it) to make money.

So yeah ... not as easy as it seems.

Um... you have to have the degree before you attempt to enter the US.

That is factually incorrect. You can come here on an F1 visa, get a degree and then get a H-1b

OK. Let's start over.

The original complaint was that someone wanted to come into the US, but the visa he wanted required that he have (at least) a bachelor's degree before he could get the visa.

My response was that this was a fairly straightforward hurdle to cross.

Pointing out that it's possible to do things differently by obtaining another type of visa really doesn't change the original situation.

I know a very talented and widely respected Canadian developer who was offered a job at a well known company but turned down at the border based on this requirement. They make occasional exceptions but it is handled case-by-case and often depends on who reviews your file.

There is an exception for people who have worked a long time in the field (I don't recall the exact number, but something like 12+ years) and can document that.

Looks quite reasonable. An undergraduate degree is bare minimum that you would require to get a white collar job in any country

Huh? Even in the US, highly skilled workers are often able to find jobs without college degrees. It is harder, but possible. So why place that burden on foreigners?

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