College has been on Rachel Tschida’s mind since the day her twin sons, Benjamin and Nicholas were born, 18 years ago. She has the usual worries – tuition, loans, laundry skills – but Tschida also has additional concerns about Nicholas, who has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
A dean’s list student and senior at Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul, Nicholas has always had college in his future. Still, despite all the forewarning, when Tschida talks about her Nicholas’s postsecondary plans, her responses are peppered with “I don’t know” and “Truly, I have no idea.” The reason: parents such as she, who have children with learning disabilities, have to do twice as much leg work to find the best higher-education fit, and often that information is hard to find.
“I’ve learned that there’s little to no help for people in our position,” say Tschida.
Valerie Broughton, a certified educational planner with College Connectors, a college admissions guidance service, echoes Tschida’s observation, but says things are improving as more learning-disabled students head to college. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 11.3 percent of undergraduates reported a disability in the 2003-2004 academic year, compared to 7.7 percent in 1989-1990.
Broughton is currently working with three students who have a range of learning disabilities, and she says finding the perfect fit means more research for both planners and parents. “Parents of children who don’t have disabilities are overwhelmed – and that’s without having to navigate the morass of disability services provided at different campuses.”
Know your needs
The first place parents and students should start isn’t on campus but at home. Taking the time to assess a child’s specific disabilities and the services best suited to help him or her means parents can go to campus armed with information. Tschida and her son considered his needs and used those parameters to pick which colleges to visit.
“One of the things that was very helpful for us was creating a list of Nicholas’ strengths and weaknesses, and finding schools that played off his strengths and downplayed his weaknesses. There’s no reason to set him up for failure if you know that an aspect of a school is going to be a problem,” says Tschida. “To be successful, Nicholas needs his environment to be structured in a certain way, and smaller schools allow that kind of structure. So we found we’re most excited about schools like Cornell [College] in Iowa and Colorado College where they do one class for 3.5 weeks straight instead of a schedule with several classes at once. For Nicholas, that would play to his strengths because he can be obsessive with things, and multitasking is next to impossible – the idea of juggling is unimaginable.”
Once families narrow down their lists of schools, campus visits are an absolute must, if for no other reason than to see firsthand the differences between the services offered in high school and what students can expect in college. “One thing that hits parents squarely between the eyes is the huge differences in disability services,” says Broughton. “In K-12 special ed, the focus is to remediate and guarantee success. But in college, the playing field is leveled, so it’s very different.” Regina Hopingardner, an assistant at Augsburg College’s Center for Learning and Adaptive Student Services, puts it plainly: “In high school, the environment is made to fit the student, but in college, the student has to fit the environment.”
Visiting Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., made it easy for Nicholas to cross it off his list of options. Although Evergreen follows the one-class schedule he likes in similar schools like Colorado College and Cornell College, the pace of the program wouldn’t work with his specific strength and weaknesses. “After visiting, we knew Evergreen would not be a good fit because the structure was too open, and all the assignments were due at the end of the semester,” says Tschida. “Pacing himself would be difficult, and the program was almost too soft.”
Hands-on vs. hands-off
Not only are the differences between high school special ed and college disability services stark, so is the variability among colleges. Broughton believes the easiest way to compare programs is to follow the structure set out in the Princeton Review’s book K&W Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Disabilities. The book breaks down disability services into three categories: minimal, structured, and comprehensive. “The label doesn’t say whether a program is good or bad,” Broughton explains, “but rather what type of service will match a student’s needs.”
A good example of a minimal program is the University of Minnesota-Duluth, wherein the Disability Services and Resources Office works with learning-disabled students to make accommodations like supplying note-takers, alternate test formats, adaptive technology, and academic advising. Students, however, must contact the office themselves to access these services. Judy Bromen, a coordinator in the office explains, “We’re expecting these students to be their own best advocates and to come to us if they need help, and then we can work with them.”
Broughton adds, “Judy [Bromen] isn’t going to follow after you and make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing academically. They do an excellent job with learning disabilities at Duluth, but they aren’t following up with you every week. If you’re so socially limited that you’re not going to find your way to Judy Bromen’s office and can’t advocate for yourself, this is not a good program for you.”
Augsburg College in Minneapolis would be what Broughton considers a more structured program. Students with disabilities have individual weekly meetings with a disability specialist to discuss any problems or academic issues that might need to be ironed out. “Disability specialists can help with time management, or if a student doesn’t understand an assignment, or if they are having difficulty knowing how to approach a professor about their disability,” says Hopingardner.
An accommodations specialist also works with the students to ensure their specific learning needs are being addressed by the available technology. And should a student’s grades start to slip, an academic alert system notifies the specialist, who gets in touch with the student in order to work out a plan for getting back on track. This more intensive approach has proved popular: The number of students using these services has gone from 90 during the 1990-1991 school year to a peak of 215 students in 2004.
Comprehensive programs are harder to find and can range from schools that charge extra fees for more ample services to colleges designed specifically for students with learning disabilities and ADHD, like Landmark College of Vermont.
The social side of school
One major area of the college experience that disability programs don’t address is the social aspect of school. “We’re just here for academics,” says Augsburg’s Hopingardner. “We don’t do any life skill coaching; we help model behavior for the classroom.” That means students with disabilities like Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that makes social interaction difficult, don’t get the same kind of help on which they might rely for academics in dealing with the social side of school.
UMD’s Bromen readily admits the lack of services for social problems is a growing concern among people who work in disabilities services. “How do we help students with that social skills part of their lives that needs to be developed? We don’t have a good answer for that,” says she says. “That is a question that colleges are starting to ask, particularly now that we’re seeing a number of students with Asperger’s or high-functioning autism, who do well academically but struggle with the social aspects of college, which tend to be very uncomfortable for them.”
Socializing is among Tschida’s concerns for Nicholas, who she fears he will be overwhelmed by the dueling demands of academics and friends. “I’m nervous. He desperately wants to be successful [socially], and that could be enough. But at the same time, because of some of his disabilities, he’s not the most popular kid at school, so he hasn’t had some of the same social experiences most kids have had,” she says. “College has much more room for differences but, at same time, it also makes me nervous that he won’t know how to strike that balance between socializing and schoolwork.”
For Tschida, this is just one among a list of issues regarding Nicholas’ upcoming foray into college that makes her nervous. Like parents of prospective college students everywhere, she doesn’t expect to exhale until Christmas break next year – if then. She hopes the planning and exploration they are doing together will pay off in finding the perfect fit, but she admits it’s a gamble.
“It’s one of those parenting things where you’re not sure if you’re being too conservative or how much to let go.”
Monica Wright is a staff writer for Minnesota Parent.
