History of USNEI

USNEI was created in the fall of 1996 as a national information and referral service to assist American educators, students, and parents with access to reliable information about international education and to provide basic information and referral contacts to resources within U.S. education. While USNEI is housed and managed at the National Library of Education, it is a distributed network of information and service providers across the federal government and the U.S. education community.

The goal of USNEI is to be able to do jointly what no one in our decentralized system can do separately, namely, to provide a focused description and guide to American education and to foreign systems of education in order to facilitate international educational mobility.

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USNEI originated in a request made to the National Library of Education (NLE) by the U.S. Department of Education (International and Territorial Affairs Staff), on behalf of members of the National Council for the Evaluation of Foreign Educational Credentials, to provide information services in the area of international education. NLE quickly learned that the idea had broad support within the Department, across various federal agencies involved in foreign affairs, and among the U.S. higher education associations.

The U.S. higher education community was aware of the need for a policy-neutral, central location to provide general information on international mobility questions and refer inquiries to the appropriate authority in the United States. Both American and overseas information seekers were overwhelmed by the complexity of navigating the U.S. education system and foreign systems, and were frustrated by the lack of direct information sources.

At the same time, the United States had been invited, and accepted, to become a negotiating party in the drafting of a new Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications Relating to Higher Education in the European Region as well as the Transatlantic Information Exchange Service (TIES) and other projects within the U.S.-European Union Transatlantic Bridge Initiative. These international projects provided a timely opportunity and challenge to develop and implement a U.S. information network.

The National Library of Education has been privileged to serve its information customers by developing and managing USNEI, and is proud that representatives of the higher education community felt that it, as a national library and electronic information center, had the capabilities and motivation to serve them. We are dedicated to maintaining and strengthening that trust.