http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-10-17/college-and-learning-disabilities/50807620/1
Learning-disabled students get firmer grip on college
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
PUTNEY, Vt. – They have developed strategies to stay focused when lectures get boring, picked up tips for staying on top of homework and brushed up on their rights as college students with documented learning disabilities.
Now, they are working on their handshakes.
"No wet dishrags. Look me right in the eye," Landmark College professor Roxanne Hamilton coaches her students, who would soon scatter to campuses across the nation to start their freshman year. She tells them that a firm grip will project confidence when they ask for what they need to succeed — be it extra time on tests, access to an instructor's notes or a distraction-free place to study.
A growing number of students with learning disabilities are enrolling in college, yet few are likely to get the level of support and encouragement available at Landmark College, one of a few small, private colleges that specialize in educating students who struggle with conditions such as dyslexia or attention-deficit disorder.
Nearly nine out of 10 of the nation's two- and four-year colleges enroll students with disabilities, and of the 86% of those that enroll students with learning disabilities, only 24% say they can help disabled students "to a major extent," says an Education Department report published in June.
That's why a growing number of short-term opportunities are cropping up to help college students with learning disabilities hone the skills they will need on a mainstream campus. Landmark, which runs three such boot camps on its campus here each summer, last year added a fourth, in Oregon. The non-profit College Internship Program this year offered similar residential programs on five campuses, up from one program three years ago. And a biopharmaceutical company awarded scholarships this year to 25 students with ADHD. Those scholarships include cash plus one-on-one coaching.
Through the programs, students learn to build on their strengths, navigate the terrain and, perhaps most of all, how to advocate for themselves.
Many students "don't have the ability to speak up for themselves, because their parents were advocating for them" in high school, says Robert Tudisco of the non-profit Edge Foundation, which pairs coaches with college students with ADHD. Even when students do speak up, he says, "colleges, to a certain degree, don't have a good handle on what these students need."
The sessions at Landmark have made a difference for Brandon Tobasky, 18, who has an anxiety disorder that sometimes impedes his ability to focus on schoolwork. Now, as a first-year student at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., Tobasky says he feels "a lot more confident and a lot more prepared in general about just about every aspect" of college, both academically and socially.
While at Landmark, Tobasky worked on his note-taking, something he never had to do in high school for students with special needs because teachers gave study guides. He also fretted about whether he would make friends. Now, he says, "I'm thinking, wow, I have so many friends. I hope I don't have too much fun."
But students participating in another Landmark program warn that the transition can be bumpy. Ksenia Bradner, 19, a sophomore at Goucher College in Baltimore, says she had a professor last year who insisted "there's no such thing" as attention-deficit disorder or depression. "I was shocked because all my life people had been understanding," Bradner says.
"You feel under attack sometimes," says Benjamin Staton, 20, a George Washington University sophomore with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. Last year, he says, one professor "was angry at me because I was asking for help. She had to go out of her way to help me." This semester, he says, he is communicating more effectively with faculty and staying on top of his course load. "It's really important to not, like, sink, which would have happened in the past," he says.
Rising numbers
The proportion of college students with any sort of disability has inched upward, to about 11% in 2008 from 9% in 2000, but the number who report learning-related disabilities is growing far faster, says a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Dyslexia and similar language-based disabilities increased from 5% to 8.9% in that period.
Students reporting attention-deficit and related disorders, which affect things such as the ability to organize thoughts or manage time, more than tripled to 19%, making it the most commonly reported disability after emotional, psychological or psychiatric conditions, which sometimes accompany learning disabilities. The GAO report identifies students with autism-spectrum disorders, which have to do with social skills, as an "emerging population." In contrast, the percentage of students with mobility problems dropped, from 29% to 15.1%; also down were reports of visual or hearing impairments.
"It's not about intellect — they're capable of doing high-level work," says Landmark professor MacLean Gander. Rather, he says, their brains are wired differently, so they learn differently. Here, it's not unusual to see some students doodling instead of taking notes, and some instructors hand out squeeze balls during class; both tools help some students concentrate. (But professors are not pushovers. Hamilton scolded several students on this afternoon for falling asleep during a talk by a guest speaker the previous day. "Do you know how annoyed your professor is going to be with you?" she asked. "They're going to think you don't care.")
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, all colleges are required to provide accommodations to college students. But they can decline to do anything they consider unreasonable. And, unlike grade schools and high schools, which are required by law to identify, evaluate and help students with disabilities, colleges don't have to do anything — unless a student asks for help and provides proof of a learning disability.
Some mainstream schools are catering to the special needs of this population. Sage and Excelsior colleges in Troy and Albany, N.Y., are taking applications for a new online bachelor's degree program for people with autism-spectrum disorders or other learning disabilities, to be launched in January.
Since 2006, the University of Alabama has offered a program for students with autism. The University of Arizona's Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques Center has been around since the 1980s.
Why colleges fall short
A number of factors help explain why many colleges may fall short. Colleges responding to the recent Education Department survey cite costs as the primary barrier to making more of those kinds of changes, along with a lack of incentives for faculty to make their coursework more accessible. Other research suggests that some disabilities-services offices, particularly at large institutions, are mired in bureaucracy, exactly the kind of thing that trips up students who struggle with things like memory and self-management skills.
"Right now, the burden really is on the student," says Marsha Glines, dean of a program for learning-disabled students at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., which is preparing to host its third annual conference aimed at helping high school students with learning disabilities explore their college options.
And therein lies another factor: Most learning-disabled students don't seek out the services available to them. Of about 67% of such students who pursued college or vocational school after high school, only 24% disclosed their impairment to college officials, a necessary first step toward getting accommodations, says a federally funded study that has tracked students from their teen years into young adulthood. Study director Lynn Newman says those students could be setting themselves up for failure.
"One of the reasons they were able to get into college in the first place (was) they got the support they needed in high school to succeed," says Newman, of Menlo Park, Calif., who hopes to compare completion rates between students who do and don't disclose their learning disabilities. Overall, her research shows, 40% of students with learning disabilities, about a fifth of whom pursued bachelor's degrees, complete their post-secondary programs, compared with about 52% of a similar population, but the data are limited. (By comparison, about half the students who come to Landmark full-time have failed or withdrawn from somewhere else, and 80% of those who graduate go on to earn bachelor's degrees.)
In some cases, students don't realize they needed help until it is too late. "I didn't reach out for support because I thought I was just lazy. I saw it as a moral and personal failure," says Taylor Burks, 25, of Jefferson City, Tenn., who has withdrawn from the University of Chicago but hopes to return.
The key reason many students don't disclose: They want a fresh start in college without the stigma associated with a disability, says the GAO report. One of the benefits of Landmark's program is that the stigma is taken away.
And that may be the biggest confidence-booster. "We're not that weird," says Morgan Behr, 20, who transferred this fall to Landmark from the University of Denver. "We're normal. We just learn differently."
