Graduate and Professional Education for Students with Disabilities: Examining Access to STEM, Legal, and Health Fields in the United States

ABSTRACT

People with disabilities have been historically marginalised and consistently underrepresented at all levels of education. In the U.S., the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) in the 1970s changed the landscape for primary and secondary education, increasing access for many students. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, and since that time students with disabilities have entered postsecondary institutions at greater rates. While in 2001, only about 5% of college students identified as having a disability, more recent estimates put the proportion of undergraduate students with disabilities at approximately 11%. Despite this growth, only 5% of post-baccalaureate students report having a disability relative to undergraduate students. This raises the question of how accessible graduate and professional education is for students with disabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate education
• professional education
• STEM
• legal education
• health education
• disability
• leaky pipeline
• inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use ‘graduate school’ as a phrase to be synonymous with ‘graduate and professional education.’

2. This and all other sample size values are rounded to the nearest 10 in accordance with restricted data licence requirements.

3. Full regression results presented as odds ratios are available upon request.

4. Only variables that showed differences between groups are presented in Table 3 for space reasons – full results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AccessLex Institute / Association for Institutional Research (AIR) [RG19863].