Will any out of state University seriously consider a college application without 12 grades of experience?

Ask a factual question, get a factual answer. Harvard has always explicitly said that a high school diploma is NOT required for admission (item C3 on the Common Data Set, with the same fact reported in various other Harvard publications),

http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/Provos...

and Harvard admits sixteen-year-olds every year (some of whom from recent years I have met).

Many of the other most selective private universities are explicit about the same policy and provide examples of admitting students younger than the typical high-school-leaving age in the United States. As long as the student is good and ready, and some students become good and ready despite K-12 school rather than because of it, the students can be admitted. Homeschoolers have been getting into great colleges

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html

for a long time.

AFTER EDIT: I should, of course, acknowledge that a desire for money and power can shape policy in these matters. And I will give an example from my own community. My state has had for more than twenty years a Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO) program,

http://www.ohe.state.mn.us/mPg.cfm?pageID=797

the first statewide program of its kind in the United States, and my son's "eleventh grade" and "twelfth grade" curriculum consisted largely of courses taken at our state's flagship university. As I type this, he has applications in process at several out of state universities, having already been admitted to two of those (and also the state flagship university) before the turn of the year.

A decade ago, my local public school district predicted that its enrollment in the district's sole high school would increase so much that the high school building would have to be rebuilt, at great expense. During public meetings about that proposal, I asked if the district had done an analysis to see if providing incentives for students to sign up for PSEO classes at various nearby local colleges would be more or less expensive than rebuilding the high school building. The school district officials said, just as the Utah school officials quoted in the submitted article said, that students shouldn't be pushed out of high school. But if students are still in a learning environment, and taxpayers save money by having students study where they are most challenged and engaged, what is the problem? Oh, the school district doubtless noticed that state funding of education follows the student (it does so in Minnesota perhaps more equally than in any other state, by a reform from the 1970s called the "Minnesota Miracle"), so if students are studying elsewhere, the district's empire shrinks.

A decade later, we look back on history. The first proposal to rebuild the district high school, including HUGE expenditures for "technology" (probably old-fashioned LAN cables and other things that didn't make sense to any taxpayer with technical employment) was defeated by a voter referendum. A new-and-improved, still quite expensive, subsequent rebuilding project was approved, and all of us here are still paying the increased taxes incurred by that project. But the predicted increase in local public high school enrollment never happened to the degree predicted--instead several privately operated schools in our area report booming enrollments, and have had to expand their buildings. Having dollars follow students is a wonderful idea. Locking in dollars for bureaucracies is not good value for taxpayers.