College Accommodations: Learning to Advocate for What You Need
One of the most important parts of the transition to college happens before a student ever steps into a classroom: learning how to advocate for what they need. At the college level, students are responsible for identifying barriers, requesting accommodations, submitting documentation, participating in meetings, and communicating with the appropriate offices. The accommodations a student may have received in high school do not automatically transfer to college, and the process for receiving support is determined by each institution.
The Bottom Line
Accommodations do not follow a student to college. Each institution sets its own process, and the student is the one responsible for starting it.
An approval is not the finish line. A student can receive several accommodations and still face academic barriers that have not been addressed.
Colleges respond to specifics, not labels. The strongest requests explain the particular barrier a requirement creates for a particular student.
Start early, and put the student at the center. Documentation, reviews, and interviews take time, and the student needs to be the one leading those conversations.
The Full Story
This summer, we worked closely with a student preparing to begin her first semester at college. She attended a high school specifically designed to support students with language-based learning differences, where many of the systems around her learning needs were already familiar. She had a long history of documented learning differences affecting reading, writing, and mathematics, along with ADHD and anxiety.
Approved, With More to Do
For this student, we began the process over the summer. She submitted the required documentation, participated in the necessary conversations with the college’s accessibility office, and worked through the initial approval process. She was ultimately approved for several accommodations, including extended time on timed assessments, access to a computer for certain exams and written work, and technology-based note-taking support.
Her evaluator had also recommended consideration of alternatives to the college’s foreign-language and mathematics requirements because of the extent of her documented learning differences. Those requests were not included in her initial accommodation approval.
This is an important distinction for families to understand: receiving accommodations does not necessarily mean that every academic barrier has been addressed.
In college, support goes to the student who knows how to ask for it.
Giving the College a Complete Picture
In this case, our team believed that additional information from the student’s evaluator could help the college better understand her specific needs. Rather than simply resubmitting the same documentation, we decided it would be useful for the evaluator to speak directly with the appropriate office and then provide a written addendum addressing the student’s functional limitations and the potential impact of the requirements in question.
The goal is not to argue that a student should automatically be exempt from an academic requirement because they have a diagnosis. Colleges have their own academic requirements and processes for determining whether an accommodation or alternative is appropriate.
Instead, the goal is to make sure the college has a complete understanding of the student’s learning profile and the specific barrier that a requirement may create.
