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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.

Foreign credential evaluation has been a relatively unknown field, however recently, over the last 30 years, it has evolved greatly and is rapidly growing. In the beginning, an educational equivalent for the U.S. was determined by the number of years one had studied in a foreign country compared to the level of education they would have completed in those same years in the U.S. Of course, this is not an accurate evaluation.

The education that was studied every year was barely even considered. US students attend classes only half as long (or even less) as many other countries. The way foreign education credentials are being evaluated has become more complex with time, so what used to be a case of black or white has recently been showing many gray areas.

At first, the evaluating process was handled by the United States Education Department via the Foreign Credential Evaluations Service. There were cutbacks in the period of 1966 through 1969, however, and in 1970 the latter agency was eliminated. In stark contrast to operations in many other major nations around the world, we have no federal standards here for assessment of the equivalency of the various overseas educational credentials.

Since 1970, the foreign credential evaluations have largely been done by private credential evaluation services or through the offices of colleges and universities. National guidelines for judging foreign educational credentials have come primarily from placement recommendations developed by the Council, but this is not a government organization and their recommendations are non-binding. International guidelines also come from UNESCO and these are often legally binding, but are some times 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.