This paper presents the relationship between organizational adaptation strategy and environmental perception for a single academic discipline: music. Music units were found to exhibit a trend toward the adoption of greater levels of organizational change as environmental perception increased, supporting the importance of environmental sensing capabilities in academe. Adaptations additionally clustered around organizational expansion as environmental perception increased providing important implications for music and other areas of higher education experiencing a rapidly evolving industrial environment. The case of higher music education illustrates challenges involved in measuring organizational change and offers a contribution to theoretical constructs in the evaluation of externally driven institutional change.