Transitioning to Nowhere?

Abstract

Young people with cognitive disabilities often attend school alongside nondisabled peers. Once they leave school, many face the disability cliff, transitioning to nowhere, the title of a report describing the fate of many thrown into an underfunded and uncoordinated system after high school. Thus, transition to life beyond secondary schooling is often a crisis for those with disabilities. Fieldwork with innovative transition experiments offered glimpses into what might happen if disabled students were recognized as transitioning to somewhere. A group of LD college students, founders of Eye to Eye, came out about their shared experiences of living creatively with cognitive differences, dedicating themselves to making the road easier for younger LD students. Additionally, alternative programs in higher education for cognitively disabled students, from early experiments in the 1980s to recent initiatives such as Think College, have begun to open doors for people for whom tertiary education was unavailable until recently.