Postsecondary Education and Employment of Adults with Disabilities

American Rehabilitation, Winter, 1999 by Robert A. Stodden, Peter W. Dowrick

These figures help portray the huge cost of failure to support people with disabilities in postsecondary education programs, both to these individuals as well as to society. In order to provide needed supports, institutions need to: (a) focus attention on overcoming barriers to high quality employment for people with disabilities, and (b) identify educational accommodations and supports, including assistive technologies, that promote the successful completion of postsecondary education programs.

Barriers to Postsecondary Education

While the data for students with disabilities show a consistent positive correlation between high quality employment prospects and higher levels of education, as a population their postsecondary education enrollment levels--although on the rise--remain low in comparison to the general population. For example, 25 percent of students with disabilities age 14 or older, as compared to only 12 percent of nondisabled students, do not even complete high school (OSEP, 1996). Of those who graduate, 19 percent of students with disabilities, in contrast to 56 percent of students without disabilities, attend a postsecondary school within the first 2 years of leaving high school. Three to five years after high school, 27 percent of students with disabilities, as opposed to 68 percent of students without disabilities, attend some form of postsecondary education (Blackorby & Wagner, 1996).

In 1996, the Office of Special Education Programs published Results of the Second PASS Field Test, an extensive study of the types of services youth with disabilities require in their transition to adulthood and postsecondary programs. Eighty percent of the youth surveyed required some type of case management service. Assistance and training related to the areas of communication, including speech and language therapy, interpreter services, reader services, Braille training, and tactile interpreting services were cited as primary needs by over a third of the total sample.

Even with these supports to their primary needs, students with disabilities face a host of systemic, sociocultural, financial, and personal factors that contribute to low postsecondary enrollment rates. One of the first studies concerning implementation of ADA found that students with disabilities have a continuing need for information and technical assistance in postsecondary education programs; minorities with disabilities are not being adequately served; and people with certain disabilities are not being helped by the current levels of ADA implementation (Pfeiffer & Finn, 1997).

Other social and cultural factors continue to play a major role in discouraging students with disabilities from pursuing higher education. Media stereotypes tend to depict people with disabilities as victims employed in low-skill jobs. People with disabilities continue to be poorly represented among faculty, staff and education administrators, thus depriving students with disabilities of role models for postsecondary success (Grosz, 1998). All these factors, in combination with low expectations from teachers, counselors and sometimes even parents, create powerful psychological obstacles to the pursuit of higher education.