CONCLUSIONS

• Policy Talk and Policy Action
• Degrees of Acceptance and Accommodation
• Implications for Reformers

       Our findings contain both good news and bad news for reformers. First, the good news: there is evidence that despite their relatively bureaucratic admissions processes, many large public universities are making sincere efforts to accommodate reform. The bad news is that those efforts are not uniform, and that, by and large, they take the form of minimal accommodation rather than innovation and adaptation. More bad news is that our interviews found some confirmation of anecdotal reports of resistance or refusal to accommodate reform.

Policy Talk and Policy Action

       While we have expressed some reservations about respondents' interpretation of the term "formal policy," it is instructive to compare the prevalence of policies and of current policy review for the different reforms. This gives us an indication of the areas where public higher education has found it necessary to respond to reform.

       Personnel at only four flagship institutions said they frequently see any of the secondary school curriculum reforms examined in this study. Nevertheless, these reforms have proven sufficiently problematic for admissions offices that many institutions or higher level agencies (depending upon the locus of policy authority for admissions) had either developed or were reviewing policies for handling such reforms in the admissions process. Looking across all three reforms, respondents at 35 states' flagship institutions reported that a policy was in place for handling instances of these reforms, and respondents in 12 states said these reforms were the subject of current policy review (of which nine already had policies in place according to our institutional respondents) (Table 4).

       By the numbers, integrated courses have generated the most policy action: 27 states with some formal policy in place, and eight states where the policy for handling these cases was under review (two of which were among those with a formal policy at present). Existence of policy does not mean positive accommodation; however, of the 27 states where respondents reported a formal policy, eight flagship institutions never count integrated courses toward requirements, and five rarely do so. At the other extreme, flagships in two states with policies in place routinely count them.

       Both formal policy and policy review were less common for the other reforms. Interdisciplinary courses offer the least challenge to conventional admissions practices: the subject matter comes from academic disciplines, and schools still report grades and Carnegie units (unless other reforms have changed their practices). This is confirmed by their degree of acceptance: respondents at 24 flagship institutions reported that interdisciplinary courses often or always count toward requirements. Indeed, the fact that respondents at four flagship institutions reported interdisciplinary courses as rarely or never counting toward requirements is an indication of the rigidity of admission procedures on some campuses. Of the 18 flagship institutions where admissions personnel reported that a formal policy was in place, ten respondents told us that interdisciplinary courses are often or always accepted toward requirements, and two said they are rarely or never accepted.[28] Respondents in three states said the policy for handling interdisciplinary courses was under review.

       Unconventional transcripts (including but not limited to competency-based assessments) have generated the least policy action, at least in terms of scope: admissions personnel on 11 flagship campuses reported that a formal policy was in place. Of these, nine said they increase their reliance on test scores to make up for missing information. (This may be in combination with other strategies, such as to seek more information from a school.) In five states, institutional- or state-level respondents reported some form of current policy review (one of which was among the 11 states with a policy in place).

       In another sense, however, competency-based reforms have generated the most policy action by stimulating attempts to re-engineer the admissions process in order to accommodate the reform. Two states have genuinely embraced the reform by developing new admissions procedures to use performance-based assessments, and other states are also exploring alternative admissions procedures. These experiments involve fundamental changes to the admissions process itself, and they will be important indicators of the prospects for designing an admissions process that truly accommodates this reform.

Table 4
Summary of Policy Status with Respect to Selected Reforms in 48 States*

	Interdisciplinary courses		Integrated courses		Unconventional transcripts		Any
	Policy in place	Policy review	Policy in place	Policy review	Policy in place	Policy review	Policy in place	Policy review
Total	18	3	27	8	11	5	35	12
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
* Policy presence is based on responses by those responsible for implementing policy (usually admissions personnel at flagship institutions), while policy review represents a combination of responses by personnel at institutions and other agencies (segment offices, system offices, or coordinating boards). Respondents may have interpreted questions about the presence of a formal policy in various ways.

Degrees of Acceptance and Accommodation

       Given the relative infrequency with which admissions personnel encounter these reforms, it is not surprising to see that most offices have adopted a simple bureaucratic response: rather than modify their procedures to fit the new types of courses and assessments, they generally attempt some form of "translation" whereby the new forms are converted to familiar ones, leaving the admissions process itself unchanged. In the language of organizational decisionmaking, this is a "satisficing" solution, whereby new problems are converted to problems previously solved, then the previous solution is applied (March & Simon, 1958). Thus, we find admissions personnel adopting a series of procedures that allow them to equate interdisciplinary and integrated courses to those on the list of requirements, or to convert narrative assessments to conventional grades. That said, it is encouraging that public institutions--archetypal large, impersonal bureaucracies--appear to have resisted the simplest bureaucratic response of all, which would be to routinely exclude courses and transcripts that defy conventional classifications. A common reaction to the ambiguity generated by these reforms was to seek additional information from schools and students, reflecting a genuine desire to get an accurate picture of a student's preparation.

       It is revealing that when asked about unconventional transcripts, admissions personnel often cited their practices for handling home-schooled students or international students. When schools that implement performance-based assessments report those results in addition to conventional grades and Carnegie units, there are no incentives for admissions personnel to attend to the new forms of assessment. More worrisome, however, is the widespread response when the conventional information is not available: increased reliance on standardized test scores. This suggests that advocates of performance-based assessment are truly in a bind. By reporting conventional measures in addition to the new assessments, they render the new forms superfluous; however, by eliminating the conventional measures, they run the risk that the new assessments will still be ignored, and that standardized test scores will be used instead. Again, the outcomes of experiments with competency-based admissions will have important implications for the prospects of genuinely accommodating this strand of reform in the admissions process.

       With respect to transfer from Tech Prep or applied associate's degree programs, we found a range of practices within the context of well-defined credit transfer policies. While flagship institutions in a few states routinely grant credit to students transferring from these programs (and one routinely refuses to do so), in most states, the practice was based on individual evaluation of courses or articulation agreements with specific two-year colleges. Both our interviews and our review of the literature suggest that this is an area where greater accommodation may exist at campuses other than the flagship institutions.

Implications for Reformers

       Our findings suggest that reformers' intuitions about the rigidity of admissions procedures may be correct, but not always for the reasons expected. In general, reforms that simply tinker at the margins of conventional classifications are most likely to be accommodated, but such accommodation will minimize the change to existing admissions practices. Reforms that fundamentally challenge or that reject conventional classifications, however, are far less likely to be accommodated in the admissions process.[29]

       This is more than mere arrogance or conservatism on the part of higher education institutions. Both schools and higher education institutions face considerable constraints due to the broad "choice set" of higher education institutions available to students and the heterogeneity of reform implementation in schools. Even when a state's public institutions act aggressively to embrace reform (as in the case of Oregon), the realities of the admissions process constrain schools: as long as students apply to private institutions and to public institutions in other states, schools will face pressure from students, parents, and institutions to produce transcript information that the other institutions expect. From the institutions' perspective, the variety of reform movements and even the range of implementation of any given reform across schools raises serious questions about the feasibility of modifying their procedures to accommodate the full spectrum of reform as realized in schools.

[28] The number of states with formal policy where courses are often or always accepted increases to 11 when reports of formal policy by state-level respondents are included.

[29] This is entirely consistent with Tyack and Tobin's (1994) interpretation of why some reforms endure and others do not.