The Path to Higher Education With an Intellectual Disability

The number of degree-granting institutions with options for these students is growing.

” The employment rate for adults with cognitive disabilities is just 22.5 percent, according to recent estimates—48.9 percent lower than adults without a disability. On top of that, a report published in March by the Department of Education indicates students with an Individualized Education Plan are about 18 percent less likely than students without one to even have expectations of obtaining a post-secondary education. As with the rest of the population, these students have to learn new skills and evolve to compete in the job market, and higher education could be an effective way to do so.”

CLEMSON, South Carolina—Like many college students pestered by nosy relatives, Sydney Davis, a sophomore, is not exactly forthcoming when her boyfriend comes up in conversation. The couple has been together two years, Davis says with the exasperated tone of a young adult clearly trying to change the subject. Davis’s friend, Annsley James, a sophomore wearing a windbreaker with her sorority’s letters on it, sits on the opposite side of the room giggling.

It’s a scene that takes place across college campuses: two friends exchange knowing glances during history lectures, at basketball games, in line at the dining hall. But unlike the majority of young adults pursuing higher education in the United States, James, Davis, and their classmates are doing so with intellectual disabilities.

The women are two students in the ClemsonLIFE program, which offers two- and four-year certificates to young adults with developmental disabilities who may not otherwise have a path to higher education. Students—whose IQs range from the 40s to 70, according to Erica Walters, the program’s coordinator—will hopefully leave the rural, hilly South Carolina campus with the ability to live on their own. A photo of James, Davis, and another student laughing is one of many snapshots of proud young adults that decorate Walters’s office on the Clemson University campus. The students beam in graduation gowns and stand triumphantly in Memorial Stadium alongside a healthy smattering of purple and orange paraphernalia.

To make that freedom possible for students with intellectual disabilities, the ClemsonLIFE curriculum includes a variety of classes ranging from relationship skills and math to navigation and nutrition. All the while, the students are integrated with the rest of the Clemson population and work both on- and off-campus at places like the stately university Fike Recreation Center, local boutiques, and the Walgreens distribution center. Just like other Clemson University students, ClemsonLIFE participants get to immerse themselves in the small downtown area of Clemson, a place dotted with cranes as new apartment buildings join the sea of pizza parlors hosting university fundraisers, cozy cafes with cavernous fireplaces and plenty of study space, and campus-apparel shops with entire closets-worth of Tiger-themed clothing.

This year, Walters said the ClemsonLIFE program received 74 applications from students in 18 different states for just 12 available spots. The 16 percent acceptance rate is on par with the University of California at Berkeley, Washington University in St. Louis, and Georgetown University. That it is more competitive to secure a spot in ClemsonLIFE than at the University of Notre Dame should not be all that surprising: After all, 13 percent of public-school students received special-education services in 2013-14—a figure that encompasses a spectrum of learning differences ranging from ADHD to Down Syndrome. However, just 263 of the nation’s more than 4,700 degree-granting institutions offer programs for students with intellectual disabilities, which the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities defines as “significant limitations in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior.”

The number of programs is growing, experts say, but they are hardly keeping up with demand. Adults with intellectual disabilities are far from immune to the changes in the workforce that have accompanied the contemporary, evolving economy. The employment rate for adults with cognitive disabilities is just 22.5 percent, according to recent estimates—48.9 percent lower than adults without a disability. On top of that, a report published in March by the Department of Education indicates students with an Individualized Education Plan are about 18 percent less likely than students without one to even have expectations of obtaining a postsecondary education. As with the rest of the population, these students have to learn new skills and evolve to compete in the job market, and higher education could be an effective way to do so.

In 1912, the psychologist Henry Goddard wrote in his study of the “Kallikak” family that, “no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one.” Goddard was part of the eugenics movement, which put forward the belief that certain characteristics can be passed from one generation to the next: People with “desirable” traits should have children to continue the strong line of positive attributes, and people with “undesirable” traits should be sterilized. Those with intellectual disabilities fell into the latter category.

The work done at Clemson, where the idyllic, brick campus seems to recede to reveal the jaw-droppingly gigantic football stadium known as “Death Valley,” and other programs like it contradicts Goddard’s idea that education cannot provide some sort of pathway to success for the intellectually disabled.

Though fewer than 6 percent of certification-granting institutions in the United States have these types of programs, the growth in contemporary options has been promising, said Meg Grigal, an expert on inclusive higher education and a principal investigator at Think College, an initiative at the University of Massachusetts Boston working to expand inclusive higher-education opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities. Grigal said that, as recently as the 1990s,  programs for this population typically offered few class choices, often setting out a prescribed curriculum with less individual latitude.

Today, however, the story is unfolding differently.

Grigal said that in the early 2000s, there was just a “smattering” of higher-education options for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and little faith that postsecondary schooling could become a reality for this population. With the passage of the Higher Education Opportunities Act in 2008, the U.S. government altered the requirements for Title IV financial-aid dollars. The law waived certain restrictions—specifically that a student must have earned a high-school diploma and be matriculating toward a degree—to qualify for federal money, increasing access and affordability of higher education for intellectually disabled students: “That was a huge game-changer,” Grigal said. “Prior to this, people with intellectual disabilities were not Title IV eligible, so that meant anybody who didn’t have the means—and college is expensive, and if you’re already supporting a student with disabilities, there may be other fiscal impacts on your family’s life—couldn’t go to college.”

In 2009, about 149 programs at two-year, four-year, and trade schools existed across the country, according to Think College estimates—that number has grown by about 77 percent in the eight years since. That’s in part because the Department of Education started funding Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TIPSID) grants, issuing the first round in 2010. Twenty-seven projects across the country were funded for intellectually disabled students over the course of five years, and Grigal said that the programs tended to focus on three broad areas: independent living (which is the bucket ClemsonLIFE falls into), academic access, and employment.