College thoughts for complicated situation

LoveTheBard
Sat, 22 Sep 2018 03:08:44 +0000

@Mamabear204 – You absolutely will want to consider accessibility, location, topography, and how easy (or not) it is to work with the Disabilities Office, get services, how your D will get around campus, etc. Public universities are mandated to provide services and be accessible, so that’s worth keeping in mind. When you visit schools, getting around campus should be a top concern; availability of good medical care is also important.

My D has a double whammy of two chronic pain conditions (Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibromyalgia) and gets around with a trike and a mobility scooter. She met with disabilities people after she was accepted to both Yale and Stanford (her two top choices). She had the distinct impression that Stanford’s Office of Accessible Education had their act together a bit more than Yale’s Resource Offices on Disabilities and that the campus, the weather, and the access to medical care would be much easier to deal with – and, for the most part, it has been. I would hardly call Stanford stress-free (and the quarter system is rough if classes are missed). They do allow students registered with the OAE to take as few as 8 units and still be considered full-time, live on campus, etc. The campus is pretty spread out.

I would imagine that many LACs would be pretty accommodating. Schools that I suspect would be particularly good that are flat and have good weather include the Claremont Colleges (a disabled accepted student we know was told that she could have the disability/facility offices on speed dial and that they would have a golf cart available to her if needed (this was never tested as she ended up not going there). LACs that are part of a consortium would probably offer many more options and seem less small than an isolated and/or rural LAC. USC (California) is very flat and pretty compact.

I would avoid schools like UCLA that have a huge uphill and downhill to contend with between the dorms and the main part of campus. UCSD is also hilly and spread out; UC Santa Barbara is right by the ocean and pretty flat. Schools in the midwest will be flat, although possibly too spread out and definitely too cold. Columbia has a pretty compact campus, but – as a disabled person who grew up in New York – I wouldn’t call NYC disabled-friendly.

Other schools that were pretty high on D’s list that seemed pretty accessible included Rice (Houston) and Wash U in St. Louis. Vanderbilt also seemed reasonably accessible, but less so than Wash U and Rice.

Davidson seemed quite good and I suspect that they are good with disabilities. I might imagine that some of the women’s colleges would also be quite good (they tend to be rather supportive in general), so Bryn Mawr might be a good choice. You need to think about schools that have more than one campus or that house freshman further away from classes – I suspect that the trek from east to west campus at Duke, for example, would get really old really fast.

Google Maps now has a terrain function that shows elevation. There is also a mapping program called mytopo.com that allows you to look at topography maps.