Welcome back to our Accommodations Series, where we are examining what accommodations can look like across a variety of important settings. 

In Part 1, we covered accommodations in a grade school setting and today we are taking a closer look at accommodations in postsecondary education. Postsecondary education can feel like a natural extension of grade school for many reasons, but in practice and especially when it comes to accommodations, there can be a world of difference. 

While there is some overlap between postsecondary institutions and grade school in relation to legal protections for students with an official diagnosis, the form those accommodations can take and the way they are secured can be quite different and much more dependent on students proactively taking steps to receive their own accommodations. We will cover the shift of workload expectations and more, so let’s dive in!

Perhaps the defining difference between grade school and postsecondary accommodations is the way expectations shift around who is responsible for securing those accommodations. 

In school settings from K-12, teachers have a legal responsibility to create an Individualized Education Plan for Autistic students that includes necessary accommodations. 

In college, there is no such expectation, and many colleges expect students to make them aware if accommodations are necessary. While colleges still have a legal obligation to meet reasonable accommodation requests from students with a legally qualifying disability, they have no obligation to create the additional planning required of teachers in grade school. But that is not to say such planning can’t be valuable for college students, too! 

One great way that many colleges are beginning to do a better job of recognizing the needs of Autistic students is through recognizing that gap and taking a more proactive support role.

As we will see in later sections, one of the greatest challenges of moving to secondary school is the increased need for executive functioning to manage both the larger workload and the less structured schedule. 

In that sense, an Autistic student having to take the extra time to talk to the right people to ensure they receive the appropriate accommodations is an added executive functioning burden that in some cases can make education less accessible. 

To match, one of the most helpful accommodations a school can offer an Autistic student is limiting the amount of legwork necessary to ensure those accommodations are available when needed.

Other areas the school might directly assist with might include help securing a living space that meets a student’s sensory needs, ensuring that safe foods are reasonably available through a student’s meal plan, or helping to schedule a student’s classes based on goals and workload per semester.

Like many aspects of postsecondary education, classrooms come in a wide variety and can vary based on the subject matter and personality of the professor teaching the class. 

Some classes are laid back and relaxed, while others are more strict and rigid. And other classes are strict and rigid for safety reasons, and others are because the professor likes it that way. 

Between all these stylistic differences and practical considerations, it can be difficult for a student requiring an accommodation to know how to navigate both the practical realities and individual personalities to get the accommodations they need. 

In some classes, they might not even need to ask because the professor doesn’t mind or preemptively allows it, while in other classes they might need to go to their dean because their history professor is old school and sees fidget items as a disruption. 

While the framing of securing accommodations can vary, many of the classroom accommodations remain the same, including:

• Sensory items such as headphones, fidget toys, or sunglasses

• Supplemental course notes

• Additional test-taking time

• Permission to leave to find a decompression space when necessary

• Permission to do an alternate assignment to meet a class participation grade

• Permission to use a laptop or tablet when it normally would not be allowed

• Alternate communication tools

If you have seen us write for any length of time about postsecondary education, you’ve likely seen us write about the simultaneous loss of structure and increased workload a student faces when they transition from high school to college. 

Not only can college start out with an executive functioning gap, but things can really start to snowball as a student begins to fall behind and the expectations begin to increase. This reality can be especially daunting for many Autistic students who may already put considerable effort into building their executive functioning skills and aren’t sure how to catch up. 

One helpful form of accommodation attempts to bridge some of those gaps by adding more structure or adjusting work expectations to ramp up more easily. The purpose of such accommodations is to give students an opportunity to adjust to a new workload before it becomes overwhelming. 

Some examples of such accommodations might include:

• Breaking down big assignments into smaller ones on shorter deadlines

• Working on a small portion of each assignment in class

• Adjusting some deadlines in consideration of other classes

• Offering alternatives to some assignments

• The opportunity to redo certain assignments after going over them with the professor

We hope this post has offered some examples of the forms accommodations can take at the postsecondary level, and crucially the way those obtaining those accommodations can be so different between grade school and postsecondary school, even though they are both educational settings. 

If you would like to share your experience securing accommodations in a postsecondary setting, good or bad, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next week to talk about accommodations in the workplace.