How Many Autistic College Students?

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the spectrum.  

Cox BE, Stockwell KM, Kepple CR, Francis CB. The Prevalence of Autistic College Students in the United States. Autism in Adulthood. 2026;0(0). doi:10.1177/25739581251405705

Abstract

How many autistic college students are in the United States? Research to date has not specifically addressed this seemingly straightforward question. Yet, an answer may be critical to the advancement of research, policy, and practice related to autistic students in higher education. This article addresses three related but distinct questions about autistic students’ college enrollment within the United States: (1) What percentage of autistic high school students go on to college? (2) What percentage of students registered with their postsecondary institutions’ Disability Services Offices are autistic? and (3) What percentage of enrolled undergraduates are autistic? To answer these questions, we examined 731 publications, reviewed 16 common survey instruments used at postsecondary institutions, and inspected codebooks from 6 federal datasets. Rather than employing traditional systematic review techniques, we used an iterative, consensus-driven assessment process to ultimately synthesize relevant data from 14 prior publications and 3 original author-generated statistical summaries drawn from a total of 13 distinct sources of underlying data. We conclude that the best available evidence suggests 42.9%–47.0% of autistic high school students continue on to college, 2.8%–4.0% of college students registered with their schools’ Disability Service Offices are autistic, and 0.3%–4.7% of all undergraduates are autistic. Ultimately, our calculations suggest that there are likely between 135,400 and 286,254 autistic undergraduates currently attending college in the United States. These estimates can be used by researchers, policymakers, and educators to highlight the importance of attending to the interests, needs, experiences, and outcomes for autistic students.

College Search and Autism: Ask the RIght Questions

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the spectrum.  

Joanna Nesbit at US News:

“In 2000, there were two specialized autism support programs, and now in 2024, there are close to 100,” says Jane Thierfeld Brown, director of College Autism Spectrum, an independent organization with resources for autistic students, families, schools and professionals. “Colleges are really listening and looking at enhanced services and programs.”
...

Besides services for autism, students should think about what else is important to them. Considerations may include major, school size, distance from home, whether religion is important, ethnic and cultural groups and other factors, experts say.

Even the weather may be a consideration if you don’t like wearing a heavy coat, says Lorre Wolf, founding consultant with College Autism Spectrum and former director of disability and access services at Boston University in Massachusetts.

...
As your family explores campuses, seek answers to the following questions, particularly for schools without autism support programs. Those answers will guide your college search.

• Has the college staff worked with many autistic students, and do they have training in the area?
• What kind of special programming is available, if any?
• How strong is the disability services relationship with other campus offices, including residence life, academic advising, student employment and student mental health? How closely do the offices work together?
• Are single rooms a possibility?
• How many credits are required per term? Can a student attend less than full time and still live in a residence hall?
• What is the availability of mental health therapists or crisis counselors?
• What is the caseload of disability services?
• How often do students usually meet with a disability services professional?

“We encourage families to call and interview the disabilities office,” Wolf says.

 

Workplace Accommodations

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the employment of adults with autism and other disabilities. Many posts have discussed programs to provide them with training and experience.  

Steven Kurutz at NYT:

A number of large employers across the United States, including Microsoft, Dell and Ford, are taking steps to make workplaces more accessible and welcoming for neurodivergent employees as the number of autism diagnoses rises.

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Workplaces with too much light and noise can overwhelm those who are autistic, leading to burnout, said Jessica Myszak, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who specializes in testing and evaluations for autism. Remote work “reduces the social demands and some of the environmental sensitivities” that autistic people struggle with, Dr. Myszak added.

But navigating the job market remains a challenge for autistic people, who are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, according to advocacy groups. And autistic job candidates hoping to make good first impressions might be reluctant to disclose their diagnoses or ask for accommodations upfront.

...

Back when Natalie Worden-Cowe, 32, was a professional musician, she struggled with the networking side of the business, a key to landing gigs. When she decided, a few years ago, to switch careers and became a software engineer, she had trouble making it through job interviews. Her professional life changed when she discovered Microsoft’s neurodiversity hiring program, which was established in 2015.

The company’s program was modeled after a venture created by the German software firm SAP, and has since been adopted in some form by companies including Dell and Ford. So far, the initiative has brought in about 300 full-time neurodivergent employees to Microsoft, said Neil Barnett, the company’s director for inclusive hiring and accessibility.

“All they needed was this different, more inclusive process,” Mr. Barnett said, “and once they got into the company, they flourished.”

Mrs. Worden-Cowe, who was diagnosed at 29, noticed the difference at Microsoft during the interview process: She was given extra time to answer questions and downtime between meetings with company employees.T

Accessing College Accommodations

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the spectrum.  

Jennifer Gerlach at Psychology Today:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/beyond-mental-health/202405/neurodiversity-on-campus-are-colleges-affirming?amp

The accessibility office is typically the gateway to accessing accommodations such as extended time on tests or the ability to record a lecture for college classes. A neurodiversity-affirming accessibility center can offer a space of support and community for neurodivergent students to meet others with similar neurotypes. At times, having a designated space can also be helpful to students who may be tackling the time management piece of transitioning to a college environment.

Katie [Belcher-Miller] reflects that self-advocacy is critical in obtaining support, yet sometimes the very diagnosis leading students to seek support can also make it difficult to self-advocate. Similarly, Kimberly [Gillette] shares that resources are best when there is a neurodiversity-affirming element, adding that issues such as autistic burnout can run rampant among autistic students. While the signs of autistic burnout might overlap some with anxiety or depression, the treatment is different. In anxiety or depression, strategies such as behavior activation are typically used. In contrast, these are not always helpful and may even be harmful in cases of autistic burnout. Autistic burnout usually requires a longer-term recovery process, including elements of rest and change to existing overwhelming stressors.

It is helpful if these supports are informed by the voices of neurodivergent students. A research study that began with a program focused on “social skills” but pivoted to a group on self-advocacy based on feedback from the students receiving services found that participation in the self-advocacy group correlated with a higher sense of academic self-efficacy and social support (Gillespie-Lynch et al., 2017).

Gillespie-Lynch, K., Bublitz, D., Donachie, A., Wong, V., Brooks, P. J., & D’Onofrio, J. (2017). “For a long time our voices have been hushed”: Using student perspectives to develop supports for neurodiverse college students. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 544.

 

 SEE, FOR INSTANCE, THE PEPPERDINE NEURODIVERSITY STUDENT ASSOCIATION. 

Theme Park and Travel Accommodations

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the day-to-day challenges facing autistic people and their families -- as well as efforts to mitigate them.   One challenge is that autism is an "invisible disability," which does not have obvious physical markers.  

Jacob Passy at WSJ:

Theme parks, airlines and other businesses are stepping up efforts to weed out abuse by opportunists pretending to be disabled to save money or cut long lines.

Companies looking to stem the abuse increasingly are turning to nonprofits or credentialing agencies to determine who qualifies for exemptions. In July, Universal theme parks in California and Florida began requiring guests with disabilities to register ahead of their visits with the International Board of Credentialing and Continuing Education Standards. IBCCES, a for-profit company, also works with Six Flags theme parks across the U.S. and the Sesame Place park near Philadelphia.

Accommodations include front-of-line access or traveling with a service animal. This assistance is critical for disabled people for whom traveling already can be a Herculean task.

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Amy Schinner, a theme-park researcher for travel-planning company Touring Plans, relies on accommodations at theme parks for her 25-year-old son, Ben, who is autistic. Her son has difficulty waiting in long lines for rides. Now, Universal visitors like her must fill out an online application through IBCCES that requires documentation of their condition and contact information for a healthcare, education or government professional.

Schinner says the documentation requirement could present challenges. The family provided a school document from 2006 in Benjamin’s application, but Schinner says she had easy access to the document mainly because the family recently moved and her son needed to apply for Social Security benefits.

“To get his records took a lot,” says Schinner, who lives in Winter Garden, Fla.

Supporting Autistic College Students

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the autism spectrum. 

At WCVB-TV, Dr. Christopher Keary with Massachusetts General Hospital's Lurie Center for Autism discusses the different types of support young adults with autism spectrum disorder need when starting college.

 

Inclusion is Good Business

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the employment of adults with autism and other developmental disabilities. Many posts have discussed programs to provide them with training and experience.

Nora Genster at USA Today:

American employers favor an idealized and frankly imaginary employee, who is young, able-bodied, neurotypical and unchanging. The problem is this employee does not exist.

The reality is as many as 25% of job seekers and current employees are people with disabilities, with that number potentially surging as millions of Americans cope with long COVID-19. As leaders continue to grapple with the tight labor market and look at grim economic forecasts for the coming year, they will have to make careful investments to make sure all employees, including those with disabilities, can do their best work.

It is simply good business.

An Accenture study found that businesses that are leaders in disability employment and inclusion had on average 28% higher revenue, double the net income and 30% higher economic profit margins compared with their peers.

Autism and Accommodation in College

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the autism spectrum. 

Laura Spitalniak at Higher Ed Dive: interview Sarah Howorth, professor of special education at the University of Maine.

In 2019, Howorth led the pilot for the University of Maine’s Step Up to College, a program meant to model how colleges can effectively support students with autism spectrum disorder. During that five-week session, she incorporated the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills, or PEERS, a social skills program for neurodivergent students developed by Elizabeth Laugeson at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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What can accessibility offices on campuses without specialized programs like Step Up do to support students on the spectrum?

There’s lots of room for improvement on college campuses. The typical accommodations that are offered, like note takers, closed captioning or extended time on tests, are not necessarily what students with autism need.

On the bright side, when I have spoken to our students’ accessibility service, they’ve seen a large increase in the number of students with autism not just coming to university but asking for support. That’s a testament to how we as a society have enabled them to be self-advocates.

If you think of the social skills involved in finding the student accessibility services on campus and talking to a stranger about your challenges, that’s brave.

On the other hand, it can be hard to fulfill their requests without modifying the curriculum. As an example, our student accessibility services director told me that students with autism sometimes ask to be excluded from group work. That’s not necessarily an accommodation, because a lot of college courses are more interactive. Plus you have internships and job placements. Life is honestly one big group experience.So what could help in this situation is giving those students somebody to sit down with and unpack a social situation that happened, so they can ask questions like, “What could have been done differently?” That’s not necessarily counseling, because it’s not that they are having mental health issues. It’s just that they are having interpersonal social communication issues.

Stigma

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

But what is equal treatment? This question raises the “dilemma of difference,” as legal scholar Martha Minow explains. “When does treating people differently emphasize their differences and stigmatize or hinder them on that basis? And when does treating people the same become insensitive to their difference and likely to stigmatize or hinder them on that basis?”[i]

---

[i] Martha Minow, Making All the Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 20.

Nicole Buonocore Porter at The Regulatory Review:

When people think about the stigma surrounding disabilities, they usually think about discomfort, fear, or sometimes even disgust.

But as I have previously argued, stigma can also result from people with disabilities receiving special treatment in the form of accommodations. I call this “special treatment stigma,” and it occurs in a variety of settings, including the workplace.

In higher education, this stigma often leads to students with disabilities either refusing to disclose their disabilities or experiencing social disapproval when they do. Both results are problematic.

Although people with disabilities are attending college in record numbers, they continue to face social, academic, and psychological stigma if their disability is visible or if they disclose a hidden disability.

Students with disabilities report feeling judged by their peers and their professors. They worry about standing out as different and perceive that their peers and professors either doubt their ability to perform academically or believe that they are receiving an unfair advantage if they receive academic accommodations.

Higher Education and Section 504 Accommodation Plans

Kerry Magro, an ASD student at Seton Hall University, writes at the Austism Speaks blog:

Before this day happened however all new incoming freshman had to attend a summer “Orientation Period.” During this period we would have the chance to spend the night in the freshman dorms, receive our laptops and also get to meet several faculty members at the school. In addition to this, I had one additional separate meeting that most of the other freshman didn’t – an accommodation meeting with The Director of Disability Support Services at SHU. This is when the ball dropped for me.

During the meeting I learned many intriguing and frightening things about how college was going to be a huge difference from high school; the main difference for me was going to be “The IEP.” When I asked what the difference would be, I was told the difference was I would not have one. I can’t believe I was that oblivious that this was going to happen. Later, I learned that under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) the IEP only exists K-12th grade. At the college door you get a Section 504 accommodations plan.

In college, you only receive “reasonable accommodations” to help make the classes accessible to those specific students with disabilities. The bottom line: there is no plan for you. The only way to receive what you need is by being independent and advocating for your needs. But what does anyone need? If you are a freshman and have autism how do you explain what you need?

See also:

• Wrightslaw page on accommodations for college students
• Report to the speaker of the Pennsylvania House on preparing ASD students for college
• Information from the US Department of Education