Gaps in disability inclusion across universities in the United States

Abstract

Disabled people face social and environmental barriers to higher education, yet there is a dearth of clear, publicly available information on university websites related to accessibility and disability inclusion. Our team previously developed disability inclusion scores for the top 50 universities offering undergraduate programs based on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and found low scores overall. Building on that, this study examines the relationship between disability inclusion (as scores ranging from 0 to 100 points) and six university characteristics for these 50 universities. The six university characteristics examined were U.S. News National Universities 2021 rankings, geographic region, year of institution founding, total number of undergraduates, public or private status of the university, and presence of an undergraduate disability studies program. Results indicate that university characteristics were not significantly associated with disability inclusion scores (p>0.05 for all university characteristics). The average scores across all categories of each characteristic fell below 72 points. These results indicate a gap in disability inclusion across all types of universities examined. Highly funded universities should evaluate their campuses for disability inclusion.