Portland, Me.
Noel P. Thompson loves his life at the University of Southern Maine. He studies entrepreneurial marketing, has a paid internship helping a local bank with its clerical work and event planning, and eagerly gives his time to a campus service organization that runs a summer camp for terminally ill children. He savors the friendships he has made here, and his occasional pangs of homesickness are assuaged by the satisfaction he derives from learning to live on his own. "I like to be independent," he says.
His carpe academiam attitude would be admirable in any college student. But Mr. Thompson is not just any student: He was born with Down syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that has impeded his intellectual development. He got to the university through a combination of his own herculean efforts and the help of Strive University, a fledgling program designed to provide a two-year postsecondary-education experience to students with developmental disabilities. He says the program has given him the confidence to consider going into advertising or becoming a disc jockey. In the meantime he is interested in sitting in on some daunting classes. "I want to study physics," he says, "because I haven't done it before."
Mr. Thompson, 24, is one of six young people, all with Down syndrome, who last fall were the first to enroll in Strive University, which was established by the University of Southern Maine and a South Portland-based nonprofit organization, Strive, that serves young adults with disabilities.
The program is part of a recent surge in the number of postsecondary opportunities for people with mental retardation. In response to growing demand, dozens of colleges have established similar programs in the past few years, and others are considering doing so, even though the efforts tend to be costly and have not previously been thought of as part of most colleges' missions.
The National Down Syndrome Society is working with public and private colleges in New Jersey to create a model system for providing postsecondary-education services to 18-to-25-year-olds with mental retardation.
"There is a huge interest in this," says Madeleine C. Will, director of the society's national-policy center. "It is a reflection of a tremendous increase in expectations on the part of families regarding their children with intellectual disabilities, and I think it is a reflection of the progress that we have made in special education."
The U.S. Department of Education is encouraging the proliferation of such programs and financing the development of a national database on those available. The organization assembling the database, the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, has identified more than 50 such programs so far.
Some college administrators in charge of disability services question whether people with mental retardation have the intellectual capacity to earn associate or bachelor's degrees, even with extensive support services and several extra years of effort. Most administrators resist the idea of altering courses and their requirements to accommodate people with intellectual disabilities.
Advocates for such programs acknowledge the limits of people with mental retardation. But, noting that colleges are filled with students who have unrealistic academic or career expectations, they say it is better to let those with mental retardation experience failure than to prevent them from aspiring to higher goals.
People with intellectual disabilities "want something more than what typically has been available," says Stephanie Smith Lee, who is director of the Education Department's office of special-education programs and has a daughter with Down syndrome. "They have bigger dreams." [italics mine].
Just where do you begin to comment on something like this? We have watered down the concept of education to the point where it has become essentially meaningless. The whole article is at the Chronicle of Higher Education, link here but it is an expensive subscription service. I poked around and found a free copy here [gotta love them freepers].
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