The US Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has conducted a survey among its member institutions, enquiring about their views of the Bologna reforms and about their current admission practices regarding three-year degrees. The survey results were published in November 2005, as an addendum to the yearly CGS Graduate Admissions Survey. Results show that:

• handling the new Bologna degrees is a pressing concern for most of them and that there is no uniform policy across the US or within each institution (corresponding to the overall context of diverse admissions policies and practices in the US);
• only 22% of the 125 responding graduate schools replied they would not consider three-year undergraduate degrees for admission;
• almost two thirds of the institutions would assess applicants with a three-year Bologna degree on an individual basis (determining equivalency, competency or admitting with provisional status).

CGS clearly supports this intermediate position in its report and warns against the negative consequences of both total refusal and unquestioned acceptance of European 3-year undergraduate degrees.  More than a definitive US response to the three-year degrees, the survey results are a “2005 snapshot” of US admissions thinking. However, it is more encouraging than a different “2004 snapshot”: a survey carried out by Educational Credential Evaluators (ECE) among US and Canadian admissions professionals had shown that almost 70% of them defined foreign Bachelor’s degrees as four-year undergraduate degrees, and that only 34% of respondents were well informed about the goals of the Bologna process.