So, you want to pursue graduate education in the US, but you only have a 3-year bachelor’s degree from India? You may be aware that you cannot do that if you plan to join, at the very least, a decent and respectable university in the US. You need 4 years of undergraduate/post-twelfth-grade education to be eligible for admission to most US universities.

There are a few possible options which you can search for elsewhere online, like getting a master’s in India first, or trying to see if you can get lucky finding a US university that would accept a degree evaluation from World Education Services (WES), for example. However, you may not know of one other option which should make you eligible for admission to most US universities as a 4-year degree applicant. It might be the least painful path for you, particularly if WES is not a suitable option for your case.

A disclaimer before you read on: I am neither a lawyer, nor a career counsellor. This is neither a legal, nor a career advice. I have written this article with the intention that it will be helpful to you in making informed decisions. Please do your own homework and gather as much information as you can instead of relying solely on this article for making your decisions. Most importantly, if you plan to follow this article, then be sure to contact the graduate admissions offices and departments of the universities before you decide to follow the steps laid down herein. It is the university’s admission decision that is final, after all.

That said, here is the option that might be suitable for some: find a university in India that is accredited by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and offers 1-year degrees such as a post-graduate diploma (PGD) (or a two-year master’s course if you are feeling adventurous), enroll yourself in it, and complete it. You can (and should) apply for admissions to US universities while you are still a student enrolled in a distance learning course in India, but you must still complete that degree before you begin your master’s in the US. The UGC accreditation is absolutely critical here. Getting a PGD from a non-accredited institute, no matter how famous or well-respected, does not count toward the 4-year degree requirement. One example of an Indian university with 1-year PGDs is Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). There are others you can find if you search around online.

The reason this might turn out to be the least painful option for you – particularly going the IGNOU route since it is distance-learning – is because it requires minimal additional effort on your part while you go about living your normal life for the 1-year you are enrolled in the course. IGNOU is also minimal financial investment, costing just Rs. 4000-15000 in total, in case you change your plans and decide that a graduate degree is not worth it. You could be enrolled in IGNOU while you are working full-time in India. You could be married and living in the US as a dependent (on, say, F-2 or H-4 visa) and be able to satisfy that 4-year degree requirement, though you would have to travel to India for giving exams. You could even be travelling around the world for most part of the year if you have that kind of money. Why? Because as long as you apply in the same year after enrolling into the 1-year PGD course, your grades are not available to US universities for evaluation. In that case, your grades in the PGD are not going to matter as long as you are able to graduate from the university with a PGD.

Here is the timeline you need to follow.

• Find a 1-year PGD program at IGNOU that you think you can do.
• In April/May, one year before you plan to start your graduate education, email the graduate admissions offices and departments of the universities that you plan to apply to, asking if they accept IGNOU degrees (there is no need to mention distance-learning). If most replies are positive, then you can follow the next steps; otherwise, you need to go for some other solution that is not detailed herein.
• In June/July, enroll yourself into the IGNOU PGD course.
• By November, you must obtain a letter from IGNOU that lists your name, year of enrollment, expected date of graduation, and the courses you are enrolled in. This acts as your ‘provisional transcript’ for IGNOU and proof that you are enrolled in a course that allows you to preliminarily satisfy the 4-year degree requirement.
• Include this letter as your IGNOU transcript in your university applications (deadlines run from December onwards).
• While you wait for responses from the universities on your applications, make sure you finish and submit any assignments in your IGNOU course by their deadlines.
• Sometime in March-May, you must inform IGNOU of your intention to give exams of all your PGD subjects, which will probably happen in June. IGNOU also has an option for expediting checking of your exam papers for a small fee, which I recommend you opt for; make sure to complete those formalities in advance.
• You should probably get admission offers before the end of April, if not before April 15th. After choosing your university, let them know of your acceptance of their offer as soon as possible.
• Complete all the required admission formalities before the end of July, like getting your F-1 student visa. The only formality that will remain incomplete at this stage is submission of your final IGNOU transcripts.
• Give the IGNOU examinations in June. You will have to be present in India for that, and will likely have to continue to stay there till August for what follows.
• Wait to get the IGNOU exam results, which start coming out in July. Needless to say, you need to have passed all the courses and have graduated from IGNOU for your US admission to stay valid.
• Timing mistakes here can cost you your admission at this stage, so if it is mid-July and you still do not have your exam grades, then get in touch with anyone and everyone at IGNOU you can in order to get your final grades as soon as possible. This should happen before end of July at all costs.
• Immediately after your grades are out, get your final IGNOU transcripts – original as well as IGNOU-attested. You may have to travel to New Delhi for that, although there is an option to get your transcripts mailed to your home that I would not recommend at all.
• You need to have those IGNOU-attested transcripts in an IGNOU-sealed envelope before you travel to US in August.
• Submit the sealed IGNOU transcripts to your university upon your arrival. If you do not submit that transcript, you risk getting your admission rescinded and finding yourself returning to your home country.
• This completes and finalizes your admission to the university. Note that some steps, timings, and formalities might differ depending on the university you are applying to. You need to figure that out for yourself.

The above information is all you need to know from this article. If you are interested, read on to know the story of an acquaintance of mine – let’s call him X Æ A-12 for fun – who wanted to pursue graduate education in the US and whose experience is the basis of this article.

X Æ A-12 had a 3-year degree from India, and additionally held a diploma and a postgraduate diploma from a non-accredited institute in India. He had a few years of work experience in the field that he was applying to for his master’s degree. The first time he was applying for admissions, he searched online about eligibility requirements, and found very little concrete information to rely on for his case. So, he sent out emails to multiple universities, telling them about his situation. All but one of universities told him that he would be ineligible for admission with his profile. They said he would need a 4-year degree, and that a “distance-learning course would not help”. He applied to the one university that was okay with considering applications with a 3-year degree when accompanied with an evaluation from World Education Services (WES). However, he was not admitted to that university in the end. A comment here – some universities, including mine (UT Austin) have two levels of checks, one at the university/graduate school level, and the other at the department level. Just because a department is willing to consider your application does not mean that the graduate school will allow it. If you wish the send out emails to universities, be sure to email both your department as well as the graduate school.

A few years later, X Æ A-12 decided to apply for admissions once again thanks to new information from my university’s graduate school that I happened to stumble across. I had visited the UT Austin graduate admissions office for some reason when this topic of 3-year degree had popped up. The lady I talked to told me she had come across this situation many times and told me that I should ask X Æ A-12 to do a 1-year postgraduate diploma or a two-year master’s in India from a UGC-accredited institute. She stressed that if UGC was willing to accredit the institute, then the UT graduate school would consider their profile to satisfy the 4-year degree eligibility requirement. It was she who told me about IGNOU, and that the online/distance-learning course would be accepted so long as it was UGC-accredited. Upon going back home, I searched for 1-year distance-learning courses from UGC-accredited universities. I emailed the lady a list of 1-year programs from four universities (including IGNOU), asking if they would be acceptable for satisfying the 4-year degree eligibility requirement. She told me UT was okay with IGNOU, Bangalore University, and Annamalai University. She was unsure of the fourth one on my list - Welingkar Institute.

That was the critical information X Æ A-12 had been missing. Soon after, he enrolled for in a 1-year PGD course at IGNOU and followed all the steps I mentioned above. While he was still a student at IGNOU, he applied to a total of 5 master’s programs at 3 universities. He was offered admission to all the three universities, two of which were in the top 50 list. He is now living his happily-ever-after in the US, pursuing a master’s. He obtained funding as a Teaching Assistant (TA) after he arrived, so his education is now almost free, his health insurance is covered for, and he gets paid a monthly salary that covers his living expenses. Final word of advice: once you arrive in the US, fight tooth and nail for obtaining a TA or a research assistant (RA) position. Go to every professor and every department at your university looking for a paid TA/RA position that covers your insurance and tuition. If those are not available, look for any and all possible on-campus jobs no matter how big or small.

I hope this helps people in need, particularly the tens of thousands of spouses of internationals living in the US on dependent visas due to lack of other options. Arriving on an F-1 visa is certainly a better prospect to consider if you are able to land funding as a TA/RA at a US university that funds your education and pays you a salary as well.

P.S.: A personal word of advice: If you are planning to enroll in a non-STEM degree in a US university and intend to pay out of your own pocket for your graduate education, then think twice. It may well leave you financially crippled in 3 short years, unless you are rich. With non-STEM degrees, you have just 1 chance to get a work visa (H-1B) after you graduate, which is selected in a lottery. You will have about 1 in 3 chance of getting that visa, since there is a yearly cap on the number of H-1B visas given out set at 85,000, and over 200,000 people competing for it every year. There is 60%+ chance of failing to land that lottery and having to return to your home country with a massive debt to repay. You have been warned!

Gajanan obtained his B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, and M.S. and Ph.D. from UT Austin. He works as a Postdoctoral Fellow at UT as of this writing. Further details about his profile are available on his personal website.