Competitive Disability Friendly Colleges

aquapt
Tue, 24 Jul 2018 21:01:49 +0000

If you’re interested in top-tier Boston-area colleges for film, definitely take a close look at Tufts. http://as.tufts.edu/fms/ I’m not personally familiar with their disability services, but I would be pretty optimistic. They have at least one long-time w/c user on the faculty, fwiw. (Also Emerson if a more specialized school would work for you… but I have zero opinion/insight re: the latter, disability-wise)

And do think about Northeastern. https://camd.northeastern.edu/mscr/ Unlike the other Boston-area schools, they have a fairly extensive underground tunnel system which could be a big help in the winter, in additional to on-campus housing that’s very convenient to the classroom buildings. Their disability services have a great reputation - I would expect them to be very forthcoming in terms of accommodations. There’s also an accessible Orange Line station right on campus, so getting around the city as much as you wanted to would be very straightforward. (The Green Line that runs through BU is not nearly as accessible; and getting into the city from Tufts is a bit more of a project, though still doable.)

I don’t know much about NYU as a campus, access-wise, but I can say that as cities and public transit systems go, I would 100x rather be a wheelchair user in Boston than NYC.

There are also the public flagships that attract sufficient “critical mass” to have a real disability community, wheelchair sports teams, and so on. UIUC is probably the most prominent of these and might be worth checking out. https://media.illinois.edu/degrees/media-and-cinema-studies-bs/undergraduate-programs

And UMinn Twin Cities, while the whole Minnesota idea might seem counter-intuitive, is another in the underground-tunnel genre and has all the medical resources of a major city, so maybe worth a look. https://cla.umn.edu/cscl/undergraduate/majors-minors/studies-cinema-media-culture

Pitt, previously noted for being on the leading edge of disability inclusion in their med school, could be a great low-match/safety (just based on the competitiveness of your list… and it has rolling admissions, so you could get an acceptance nailed down early) - if you have Stanford-level stats then you’d surely qualify for the Honors College at Pitt (1450+ SAT) which has its own housing. Great urban campus and access to medical services.