Melinda Roy
“I just found half a block of cheese in my plastic container drawer. And some days I don’t think my ADHD is real,” I texted a friend this morning, after emptying my dishwasher and discovering the cheese that I had spent half an hour searching for last week. I shared this story with Andrew and Pat in our stand-up meeting, and we all chuckled. Then I read a headline about Humber College applying the social disability model to student services. What a smart move, I thought, to publicize this shift.
Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates reports, first-year students reporting disability has grown to 35% in 2024, from just 5% in 2001. Social media platforms like TikTok provide accessible disability education (and misinformation) from influencers and academics to youth. Where to non-disabled people, or those less involved online, the phrase “social model of disability” may seem unfamiliar, it is (at least in my algorithm), common in online disability discourse, and so more familiar to youth.
The social model of disability identifies how people with disabilities are restricted from full participation in society, due to the physical and technological structures and culture and social attitudes of that society. When an organization is transparent about their cultural view on disability, people considering post-secondary education can better predict how members of that institution are likely to engage with them, and who, in practice, are truly valued and equal members of their learning community.
Statements like this from Humber College make it more attractive for prospective students with disabilities—and are a smart move in Toronto’s competitive post-secondary education market for local prospects.
Many Canadian institutions are struggling to adequately respond to and fill the empty seats from a reduction in international students, and many are looking at their retention programs.
In this Statistics Canada study from 2019 which looks at post-secondary education enrolment of youth with and without neurodevelopmental and mental health conditions, the authors report ADHD as the most common diagnosis, and youth with ADHD were less likely to pursue post-secondary education than youth diagnosed with other mental health conditions. When compared with the control group (youth with neither condition), only 60% of youth with a neurodevelopmental condition and 48% of youth with a mental health condition enrolled in post-secondary education in the same time frame. I’m not surprised that youth with ADHD are the least likely of any single diagnosis (ADHD is often comorbid with other conditions, which the study shows the combination of both further reduces the likelihood a youth will pursue post-secondary education), as the application process itself demands a lot of a person’s executive function skills over an extended period of time.
Executive dysfunction is a core trait of ADHD, which includes struggling with task initiation, time management, memory, organization and planning. For prospective students this can show up as last-minute course registration, delays in fee payments or applying for financial aid. In a service culture that understands and builds systems in that reduce the executive functions required to do all the pre-classroom tasks, not only are systems easier to access for ADHD students, but for all students.
Humber College publicizing their approach to disability services is a smart recruitment move, but also reflects actual systemic and cultural change that will increase applicant to enrolled conversion rates, retention and graduation rates for students with disabilities. It’s a smart strategy to attract this underserved and often education-shy demographic, but will ultimately fail if it does not address the needs of students throughout their academic careers. For post-secondary institutions, many retention initiatives focus on identifying students at-risk for attrition, but retention planning for students with disabilities must include a culture that supports accessible design not only from tools and pedagogy, but to service and systems design.
When accessibility is an integrated part of a culture, I can forget that my neurodivergence can be disabling. You’ll know you’re doing something right when an applicant, student, or employee with a disability forgets for a moment that systems and support weren’t always designed with them also in mind—they forget they were once considered imposters or outcasts. Not everyone knows what it’s like to leave cheese in a container drawer rather than the refrigerator, to lose their keys on a daily basis, or forget to submit a form on time. But in the world of higher education, if we replace cheese with assignments and the refrigerator with learning management system drop-boxes, or emails and our outbox, we’ve all made similar mistakes. I am hopeful that Humber College will be the first of many higher education institutions to reflect on their cultural understanding of disability and accessibility, publicize their approach, and adjust their systems to meet the needs of those with disabilities in their local community.