Admissions offices across the country were grappling with how to fairly evaluate unfamiliar credentials. AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, stepped up to the challenge. As the demand for international education grew, AACRAO registrars and admissions professionals began conversations to address the issue. How do foreign education systems compare to our own?
The concept of placement recommendations was born. Evaluations that translated foreign coursework into the US context. Should this student from Egypt be placed in their second year? Should this Indian student receive transfer credit? These were the kinds of questions AACRAO began to answer through collaborative research and guidance.
In 1955, AACRAO launched a small working group referred to as a mini council dedicated to placement recommendations. By 1957, AACRAO expanded its work creating research publications for use by admissions professionals across the country. These books provided country by country overviews of foreign education systems and how they aligned with US standards.
It wasn’t long before international admissions offices had entire bookshelves filled with these resources. Algeria, Japan, Turkey, Russia. Each volume a critical tool for understanding and placing international students. These early publications laid the groundwork for a standardized approach to the field.
To strengthen consistency and expertise, AACRAO established the National Council on the Evaluation of Foreign Educational Credentials known simply as the Council. It brought together higher educational professionals, the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), the College Board, NAFSA, the American Council on Education, the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and others.
These volunteers met regularly, sometimes for days at a time, to review educational materials and vote on placement recommendations. The Council created a peer-reviewed consensus-based system that allowed evaluators across the country to speak the same language.
None of the contributors had a financial stake in these conversations. Instead, it was a collaborative effort to build a shared knowledge base. Over time, the Council became a cornerstone of professionalism and credibility in international credential evaluation. The publications generated by these efforts were vetted, approved, and standardized by the Council, solidifying the framework of what we now call applied comparative education.
While AACRAO led the charge in the development of formal recommendations, NAFSA contributed in a unique way through hands-on in-country research. Along with the College Board, the Project in International Research (PIER) sent educators abroad to study education systems directly, then collaborate on publications with multiple authors. These projects produced their own placement recommendations.
This fieldwork brought valuable context to the literature. What a classroom looked like in Brazil, how exams were structured in Ghana, how credits worked in Indonesia. Together, AACRAO and NAFSA’s efforts created a layered interdisciplinary understanding of global education.
In the same period of time, organizations like the Fulbright program provided additional dimensions. The Institute of International Education (IIE), for example, coordinated placements for Fulbright scholars at US institutions.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs provided funding to AACRAO to publish two to three country profiles annually. This became known as the World Education Series, which was a series of individual country profile books published by AACRAO, which became the first comprehensive body of literature in the field.
In the 1960s, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), through its Academic Advisory Service (AAS), evaluated the academic records of foreign graduate students coming on scholarships to study in US institutions. Each year, individual evaluators came to Washington, DC to assess these scholars’ credentials under the guidance and supervision of Miss Hattie Gar.
By the 1980s, immigration to the US had grown significantly, and so had the need for credential evaluations. Private credential agencies began offering services to universities, licensing boards, immigration attorneys, and government bodies.
To maintain credibility, they formed professional associations like NACES, the National Association of Credential Evaluation Services, and AICE, the Association of International Credential Evaluators. NACES and AICE are both self-accrediting and have similar membership requirements. However, these groups differed in their approaches. NACES members created independent recommendations while AICE promoted unified standards.
Around 2004, internal differences led to the dissolution of the original AACRAO Council, creating a more fluid, decentralized field. Still, these changes marked the profession’s expansion from a niche service to a vital part of international mobility and access that serves almost 1 million people a year.
In 2005, the field entered the digital age with the launch of EDGE, the Electronic Database for Global Education. In partnership with AACRAO, the EDGE database was developed by Dr. William Paver and funded by the Foreign Credential Service of America (FCSA), which eventually featured over 240 country profiles with detailed placement recommendations.
Dr. Paver was ably assisted by Gloria Nathanson of UCLA, Robert Watkins of the University of Texas at Austin, Johnny Johnson of Monterey Peninsula College, and Jerry Sullivan and Dale Gough of AACRAO. During this period, this group advocated and obtained approval for the creation of the International Education Standards Council (IESC) under the auspices of AACRAO.
In 2007, AACRAO assumed oversight of EDGE, which continues to manage it through the IESC. This juried group reviews and refreshes content regularly, ensuring up-to-date consensus-driven guidance and is responsible for the approval of all elements in the database, including the placement recommendations.
EDGE quickly became the go-to tool for credential evaluators across the US, including universities and the federal government. By 2014, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adopted EDGE as its official standard for immigration purposes.
What began as printed booklets is now a trusted living database, powering thousands of decisions every day. To this day, EDGE is the only nationally based set of standards overseen by a large venerated national membership organization. AACRAO continues its tradition of making substantial contributions to the field.