Journal of Education and Human Development

Are You In or Out? Canadian Students Who Register for Disability-Related Services in Junior/Community Colleges versus Those Who Do Not
Catherine S. Fichten, Alice Havel, Laura King, Mary Jorgensen, Jillian Budd, Jennison Asuncion, Mai N. Nguyen, Rhonda Amsel, Evelyne Marcil

Abstract
Junior/community colleges tend to enroll more students with disabilities than four-year colleges. Therefore, knowing about the nature of students’ disabilities and about which students register for campus disability-related services is important. Here, we report on a random sample of 1387 Canadian junior/community college students, 17% of whom self-reported a disability. The most common disabilities reported, in rank order, were learning disability with or without attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (LD/ADHD), mental illness, chronic health problems, hearing impairments, and visual impairments. Only 44% of students with self-reported disabilities indicated registering for campus disability-related services. Prominent among those who had not done so were students with mental illness and students with chronic medical conditions. When we split students into those with only LD versus those with only ADHD, we found that students with LD were quite likely to register for services, whereas those with ADHD were not. In general, students with disabilities were under-represented in the sciences, although we found no relationship between students’ disabilities and their programs of study. The same was true of students who had and those who had not registered for campus disability-related services. We speculate on why students with specific disabilities do not register for disability-related services.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jehd.v7n1a19