Quantifying Difficulties of University Students with Disabilities

Students with disabilities experience more than the usual number of challenges in their postsecondary education experiences. Students with disabilities typically receive support services from an administrative unit assigned to assist them. But these assigned administrators and their staff often have difficulty identifying the factors that are most useful to support the academic and adjustment success of students with disabilities. This research project aimed to identify the specific factors that are predictive of reduced school retention and graduation rates in students with disabilities. To this end, the researchers used ten years of data (2004-2013) from a large urban university. The data set contained 2,578 students of disabilities with relevant individual school-linked variables which were analyzed using quantitative statistical tests. The type of recorded observations included those from the research literature which were deemed most likely to answer the important research questions.