This document provides an overview of a qualitative study that investigated the experiences of college students with disabilities at four-year degree-granting institutions. The study found that students faced challenges with their identity development and stigma, had varying experiences with accommodations and support, and encountered social and academic barriers. To improve experiences, the study recommends increasing campus awareness and sensitivity training, better preparing faculty to support students with disabilities, and conducting further research on identity development and career transitions.

1. An Exploration of the Lived
Experiences of College
Students with Disabilities
Jackie Koerner
Saint Louis University

2. Why study college students
with disabilities?
College students with disabilities:
• are 2,266,000 of 20,928,000 total college students
(Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012)
• typically attend community colleges (Newman, Wagner, Knokey,
Marder, Nagle, Shaver & Wei, 2011)
• attend any higher education at a rate less than half of
their peers without disabilities (Newman et al., 2011; Wilson et al.,
2012)
• of those who enroll, only 34% graduate from four-year
higher education institutions (Newman et al., 2011)

3. Why this study design?
• College students with disabilities often do not to
disclose their disabilities to their higher education
institutions (Carney et al., 2007; Claiborne et al., 2011; Getzel & Thoma,
2008)
• Research available has lacked the voices of
students with disabilities (Gibson, 2006; 2012)
• Open to any disability so no experience would be
excluded

4. Study Purpose
The purpose of this qualitative study
was to investigate the experiences of
students with disabilities during
attendance at four-year degree granting
higher education institutions.

5. (brief) Rationale
While society has greatly progressed from lifetime
institutionalization of individuals with disabilities, the
focus now needs to include supporting rights and
integrating individuals with disabilities into the
community so they may fulfill their ideal roles within
society. The benefits of including students with
disabilities in the higher education environment reach
beyond the individuals themselves. Students with
disabilities can achieve success in higher education;
society on the whole, however, needs to support their
needs as learners.

6. Key Theories
• The medical model defines disability based upon
the biological fact of the disability (Hutcheon & Wolbring,
2012; Pothier & Devlin, 2006)
• The social model focuses on how society is
developed around people without disabilities or the
“able-bodied” (Camara, 2011)
• Gibson’s Disability Identity Development Model
(Gibson, 2006)

7. Research Questions
1. What motivates students with disabilities to attend
higher education?
2. How do self-advocacy skills, or the lack thereof,
impact the higher education experience of students
with disabilities?
3. How do students with disabilities perceive the
accommodations they receive at their higher
education institutions?

8. Brief Study Design
• Higher education colleagues forwarded study
information to student body
• Interested parties emailed for more information and
interviews were scheduled
• Semi-structured interviews of around an hour
• Audio recorded, then personally transcribed and
coded

9. Data Collection
• Fifteen students responded, nine scheduled
interviews
• Fourteen disabilities disclosed during the interviews
• Ten different academic majors
• All face-to-face except one over video call
• Notes on dialogue, participant mood changes, and
non-verbal communication during the interviews

10. Data Analysis
• Began after the first interview (Merriam, 2009)
• Listened to audio recordings multiple times
• Read interview transcripts
• Aligned interview transcripts with researcher notes
• Took excerpts from interviews and coded the data
(Merriam, 2009)

11. Resulting Themes
• Identity
• self-advocacy, self-worth, goals and motivation
• Accommodations
• academic life, support from others
• Social interaction
• Assumptions and stigma
• Barriers

12. Identity
• “I’m say, ‘No it's totally cool. I’d like to talk about it and
tell you about it.’ It’s part of who I am.”
• “They’ll ask a bunch of questions and I don’t mind
talking about it.”
• “I’m normal. I just learn a little differently and it might
take me a little longer to get somewhere.”
• “This is who I am. I identify as being dyslexic. It’s not a
diagnosis. It’s my identity now. I’m this machine of
wanting information. I want to know more about it.”

13. Identity
• “I mean learning to use this gift to my advantage. It's
kind of neat trying to figure me out. I really like it.”
• “It was all about my battle with dyslexia almost and
it’s…I say battle but it’s almost a war because it’s an
every day struggle.”
• “At first I felt uncomfortable. These are my limitations.
Sometimes I’m going to need help.”
• “I never considered it a disability. I honestly didn’t know
it was a disability until this year.”

14. Self-Advocacy
• “I just took the initiative and emailed the disability
center to ask them…I consider myself a self-advocate.”
• “I'm a pretty good advocate for myself, but all of this
shouldn't be falling to me.”
• “I sought academic coaching”
• “Every first class I have to be the person who goes up
to the teacher and say, ‘Hi! I have a disability. How do
you want to do this?’”

15. Self-Worth
• “I was just a good kid. I failed.”
• “I was held back. I was belittled by people…I truly
believed it. And this progressed throughout my whole
entire career…I had no idea what was wrong with me.
I’m just the village idiot.”
• “I’m still trying to be on that level of, ‘Yes, I can be
normal.’ It’s still that acceptance thing of, ‘Yes, you
are different. Yes, you learn differently. You can’t just
take all of this on at once. You can't be super.’”

16. Self-Worth
• “So, basically I didn’t want to be as vulnerable as
that anymore…”
• “I know it’s hard to believe, but actually I was
smarter than this as far as to get it. I was really
down about this class I was really depressed about
not being able to make it though like everybody
else”
• “I am who I am but I can’t help but feeling that I’m
not enough.”

17. Goals and Motivation
• “I guess it was natural to continue my education.”
• “I never considered not going.”
• “It’s always been part of our family to go to college.”
• “Growing up in my house it wasn’t really a question of if.”
• “I always knew I was going to go to college. It was
something I looked forward to forever.”
• “Basically higher education was not something many of the
people in my family achieved.”

18. Goals and Motivation
• “I enjoy learning and helping people.”
• “Ultimate goal is to work in the music industry in some capacity”
• Giving back to the community or family
• “Graduate and get a career in the teaching field…I want to get my
Ph.D.”
• “The fact that I will have a career that I know I will be happy with.
Forensic science is so cool.”
• “I want to communicate how you can help yourself.”
• “I want to send robots to space.”

19. Accommodations
• “It just seems very…you're out in the open for this
paper to be given to the school…and that stays on
file.”
• “They said, ’We will give you anything that will help
you,’ and I said, ‘Awesome! And thank you!’”
• “I wasn’t expecting to have…” (thoughtful pause) “I
didn’t know you could get accommodations for
anxiety.”

20. Accommodations
• “It’s not about being smart. I just learn differently and it
takes me longer to process things…it’s just one of those
big frustrations.”
• “My mom is said, ‘That should be protected without
having to reveal it’s you.’ And I said, ‘That’s not how it
works.’”
• “You’re not giving me an advantage you’re making it
even, but okay….normal people are here (gestures with
hands by head) and I'm here (gestures with hands by
ribs) trying…”

21. Accommodations
• “Most of them check to make sure I’m registered
[for accommodations]…I understand their concerns.
There are a lot of students who have motivations for
cheating.”
• “‘I have accommodations’ and they say, ‘For what?
You seem plenty smart. You seem fine.’ They just
don’t get it. They don’t quite understand what a
disability is.”

22. Academic Life
• “I have to learn day-by-day and the professors here are really, really
awesome. They’re very accepting of it.”
• “I missed out on a lot of learning there because I would just have to leave
everyday.”
• “It gets hard at times for me to stay motivated to complete my work or that I
should stay in school.”
• “I talked to him at the beginning of the semester, and [now] it just didn’t
work for him…”
• “…it was kind of made clear that these specific accommodations are not
things that they can enforce. They’re things they can
recommend…because the administration can't control the way a professor
conducts their classes.”

23. Support from Others
• “Through me and my disabilities she’s learned how to help her
students do better…”
• “I as a person have felt really supported by [university] with the
resources they have provided me and I’m really grateful for them,
but there are so many other people that don’t even know you can
seek support.”
• “…there is a new academic coach. She is amazing. I really got to
build a bond and a connection with her.”
• “In the cases where the professors did do that, I’m not sure it was
because of the accommodations and that they would have
anyway just by understanding my situation.”

24. Social Interaction
• Some said their friends were supportive, others suggested
their disabilities created a barrier.
• “Even my closest friends seem resentful of it.”
• “I hate that that’s my whole personality when someone meets
me.”
• “I don’t think it’s affected me that much socially. I’m introverted
anyway so it doesn’t.”
• “It definitely has affected me socially and made me draw into
myself a little bit and search very specifically for the people
that I think will understand what I am going through.”

25. Assumptions and Stigma
• “My mom and dad sheltered me from that.”
• “…they don’t exactly know how to handle it unless they
have had contact with that type of person then they don’t
know what to say.”
• “I think there is this potential where people are like, ‘Oh,
you’re the same kind of tired as I am, why don’t you just get
up and do it?’”
• “They act like it’s not relevant because I don’t look like I’m
going to die at anytime. It’s invisible to them and it doesn’t
apply to them. And teachers don’t understand either.”

26. Assumptions and Stigma
• “I don’t know why we have to call it mental illness and medical illness
when we could just call it all illnesses. Why does it have to be
separate?”
• “It just depends how comfortable the professor is kind-of-a-thing
because if it’s something they barely know anything about, they’re
less likely to say, ‘We can make this work,’ and if they know enough
they say, ‘We can make it on a trial basis sort-of-thing.’”
• “…everyone looks at you differently like you’re a child that needs to be
protected or be sheltered or have that helping hand or something.”
• “It’s a guessing game and you can burn a lot of bridges by this one
statement of: ‘I have dyslexia.’”

27. Assumptions and Stigma
• “‘I have accommodations’ and they say, ‘For what?
You seem plenty smart. You seem fine.’ They just
don’t get it. They don’t quite understand what a
disability is.”
• “I feel like it’s just still this fight to [combat] all the
studies. People when they think of Autism, they think
of Rainman and they don’t think of somebody who is
verbal and a fully functioning person.”
• “…I’ve had so many negative reactions to it in college
that I just didn't want to be singled out.”

28. Barriers
• “I didn’t qualify for any accommodations on the SAT or the
ACT…I was asking for was to have it on a computer with larger
font so I could type my essay versus write it. That was all I
wanted.”
• “If it was possible for every university computer to have the
dyslexic font and then they could just email the testing center the
test in dyslexic font that’d be awesome! I’d love that. It’d make my
life awesome!
• “Every first class I have to be the person who goes up to the
teacher and say, “Hi, I have a disability. How do you want to do
this?” And they’ll say, “I haven’t looked at your file yet. Come talk
to me after next class.”

29. Barriers
• “Other professors out there say, ‘This is your problem, not
mine.’”
• “Last semester my chemistry professor, for every test, I had
the same struggle. [She would say], ‘It’s a night test. It’s 2
hours. You should finish it in that time. Don’t worry about it,
you’ll be fine, you don’t need [accommodations] for this.’”
(long pause)
• “[Faculty] tend to put in short YouTube clips so he’ll think
that [captions] are not necessary. And most of those are
the animated cartoons that will talk really fast. I’ve talked to
him. All the teachers knew that at the beginning of the year
but then he just never did anything about that.”

30. Barriers
• “The staff weren’t trained in cross contamination and students
were everywhere. I ended up eating out of my microwave for
freshman year.”
• “I talked to one of the teacher’s about it and she said, ‘Yeah, I
don’t know what to tell you.’”
• “Almost all of my roommates have been awful.”
• “It’s just an inconvenience for them or something.”
• “There were all of these extra struggles. I never thought it would
be that difficult to have a disability, because it’s not something
you can see. It’s in my brain and my brain is just wired a little
differently.”

31. Discussion
• Higher education impacts outcomes of students with disabilities
• Identity of students with disabilities
• Stigma prevents students with disabilities from disclosing
• Self-advocacy and transition education for students with
disabilities
• Campus awareness and sensitivity for students with disabilities
• Lack of knowledge about accommodating and educating
students with disabilities

32. Why these results?
• Societal perception of people with disabilities
• Lack of campus sensitivity training for students
• Inadequate preparation of administrators regarding
supporting students with disabilities
• Inadequate preparation of faculty members to teach
students with disabilities
• Poor education of the faculty members regarding
accommodations at higher education institutions

33. What should we do?
• Promote services available on campus
• Sensitivity training for staff and students
• Educational component in higher education
administration programs
• Accommodation and awareness training for all
faculty members
• Continue learning about students with disabilities

34. Future Research
• Transition preparation of students with disabilities
• Lived experiences of college students with
disabilities
• Students with disabilities who choose to not
disclose their disabilities
• Examining the experiences of students with
disabilities in specific degree programs

35. Future Research
• Experiences of college students with specific
disabilities
• Students with disabilities transitioning into their
careers
• Persistence of college students with disabilities
• Examine identity development of college students
with disabilities (Gibson’s Disability Identity
Development Instrument)

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