American universities dedicate millions of dollars each year to disability services, ensuring students have access to the accommodations they need to succeed on a level playing field with their peers without disabilities.

But does the relatively safe haven of higher education set students with disabilities up for failure when they graduate into the workforce, where accommodations might not be as plentiful beyond what the law requires?

[Above: A job coach assists an employee with assembling a corrugated plastic tote. Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI) offers personalized employment services for people with disabilities that include career plan development, on the job coaching, résumé creation, and more.]

Experts say young people with disabilities are more likely to go through college without work experience, and unemployment remains high among people with disabilities in the United States. In 2018, just 19 percent of Americans with disabilities were employed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But having a disability can be a benefit in the workplace for both employee and employer, says Emily Augustine, a 35-year-old mother of two and a high school math teacher at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. She was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was 13.

The challenges Augustine grew up with as a student with a learning disability have only benefited her in her current profession, she says. She attributes this outcome largely to her mother’s influence, an English teacher who instilled in Augustine that her disability was something “she had to deal with,” but was never to be used as an excuse for not doing high quality work in a timely manner.

“For me, [having dyslexia] really harnessed and fostered a sense of organization, a sense of deadlines, which has done nothing but help me in education. I’m never putting things together at the last minute because I’ve just never been able to function like that,” she says.

But the world of education provides a more welcoming environment to people like Augustine, says Deb Dagit, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and INSIGHT Into Diversity Editorial Board member who previously served as the chief diversity officer for the biopharmaceutical company Merck.

Asking for accommodations and openly communicating about disability is more “normative” in educational settings, she says, beginning with the K-12 environment and continuing throughout higher education.

This norm can pose problems for individuals with disabilities. Dagit says they are less likely to ask for accommodations in the workplace than they were in school, even if they were taught how to self-advocate.

Colleges and universities also fail in other ways to prepare students with disabilities for the workforce, Dagit argues.

One problem, she says, is that university career offices tend not to view themselves as having any disability expertise and end up leaving students with disabilities out of the career placement process altogether. Career services staff often mistakenly assume that the disability resource center is handling it, she adds. 

Wendy Shoemaker, director of the University Career Center (UCC) at the University of Kansas (KU), says it’s essential for career and disability services staff to partner on providing resources.

“The key to providing good services to students with disabilities is to have a connection between the accommodations office and career services,” Shoemaker says. “Career planning, résumé building — those services don’t change so much in terms of the way we work with students with disabilities. It’s about the additional content knowledge and the accommodations process to employment or internships.”

UCC staff first realized they had some work to do in the early 2000s when Alan Muir, a national speaker and program manager for disabilities at Delta Airlines, came to talk about career services and students with disabilities. A few years later, UCC and Student Access Services had created a website to share information on career development, including videos about disclosure and limitations. That was the first step.

In 2012, the university pulled together a small grant to fund a graduate student who would act as the “bridge” between the two offices. That position has been funded each year since.

“That graduate student becomes bilingual, if you will, as a career coach supporting students with disabilities,” Shoemaker says. “In addition to specifically helping get them dialed in to the resources, [the graduate student] is enabling and encouraging them to be good agents for themselves in the accommodation request process.”

Another misconception UCC staff address is the idea that employers don’t offer accommodations like universities do, Shoemaker adds.

“Recent alums as they’re out there transitioning in to their first full-time jobs often would not request accommodations, thinking it was a brave new world,” Shoemaker says. “We enable them to think about their strengths from a disability standpoint, understand what their functional limitations are, and how to talk to HR and request accommodations in a way that is empowering for them.”

One key solution to improving employment among people with disabilities is ensuring that youth gain work experience well before they enter college, says Susan M. Foley, PhD, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

ICI is part of a network of institutes nationwide that help increase employment of people with disabilities. Training and preparing for the workforce should begin in high school or even as early as middle school, Foley says, though it’s not always easy.

 “We’re finding they may not have those opportunities as much, they make not take advantage of opportunities, or they’re still learning about how to advocate for accommodation,” Foley says. “Combining employment with educational experience is kind of an art form of how to interact and when to merge those two things so that people with disabilities have the best opportunities for employment.”

Universities and community colleges are doing more to connect higher education directly to jobs. For instance, colleges in Nebraska can partner with Explore VR, a vocational rehabilitation effort funded by the Career Pathway Advancement Project grant. The partnerships allow people with disabilities to undergo customized training so they can step into high-quality jobs when they’re finished.

KU’s career center maintains a list of students who receive disability services on campus so they can send out mass emails when an employer looks specifically to hire employees with disabilities.

Internship opportunities are also essential to helping students with disabilities successfully enter the workforce, according to Dagit.

One such opportunity is the newly initiated Quest Program, operated by Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI), a manufacturing company and nonprofit organization based in Minneapolis whose mission is to employ people with disabilities. The life skills program, which will prepare participants for jobs in manufacturing, serves as an alternative to community college for some of the local community’s high school students, according to MDI CEO Peter McDermott. 

Another major professional development opportunity, according to Dagit, is the Next Generation Leaders Program, sponsored by the nonprofit organization Disability:IN, whose mission is to improve disability inclusion and equality within businesses across the country. 

With Next Generation Leaders, Disability:IN provides scholarships to over 100 students and recent graduates to participate in a weeklong conference. The scholars receive one-on-one mentorship and  “speed dating interviews” with hundreds of companies looking to recruit and hire, in addition to opportunities to present business ideas “à la Shark Tank,” Dagit says.

Participants also receive practical advice on topics such as how to dress in the workplace, improve résumés, navigate social media, leverage their networks, and master the etiquette of informal business gatherings. The conference provides interpreters, captioning, and a variety of other resources to be fully accessible, Dagit says, “modeling for all participants how to make [accessibility] ubiquitous and normative.” 

Businesses can help improve the pipeline of employees with disabilities by asking for student candidates when they are recruiting at colleges and universities. “A company typically has seven to 12 schools where they do most of their recruiting,” Dagit says. “If those companies leverage their relationships with the schools and say, ‘I need to see students with disabilities as part of the pipeline,’ it will motivate schools to do that outreach to students receiving services.”

Dagit calls this type of action “creating the pull.” In other words, the onus isn’t just on colleges and universities to push students with disabilities into the arms of accepting employers; rather, employers can proactively include people with disabilities, which can influence the creation of more equitable policies within higher education.

According to McDermott, one main benefit of hiring people with disabilities is tapping into the potential of a vastly underutilized workforce. “Employers gain access to a whole group of people who have not been given the opportunity to work in the world. They’re people who show up on time, appreciate their job, and respect their co-workers. They come to work with an especially positive attitude because they haven’t been given opportunities elsewhere,” he says. 

As for the students themselves, Augustine says they need to meet their challenges head on, no excuses, as her mother taught her to do. “You need a growth mindset and you need grit to overcome and balance out the deficits. That’s true of anything.”

Ginger O’Donnell is a senior staff writer for INSIGHT Into Diversity. Kelsey Landis is editor-in-chief of INSIGHT Into Diversity. This article ran in the October 2019 issue.