(WIP) About Us, Without Us: A Review of U.S. Disability-Related Insitutional Policies and Practices

Students with disabilities*, including those in engineering, are well known to face a multitude of challenges, including social, physical, emotional, and economic barriers, while navigating higher education. Institutional policies and practices are key drivers to the functioning of a university and, as such, play an important role in the protections, experiences, inclusion, and support of disabled students. This Work-in-Progress Research paper reviews institutional disability-related policies and practices at five U.S. higher education institutions. The five institutions were selected to represent a range of institutional types (private vs. public), geographic locations, and sizes (of their engineering programs). Building on the University Disability Inclusion Dashboard developed by The Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center, we focus our analysis on two specific aspects of institutional policies and practices: (1) accommodations for disabled students and (2) public image around disability inclusion. Our analysis found that vagueness within the accommodations process and limitations to publicly available information contributes to weakened robustness in the accommodations, support, and protections currently provided to disabled students across universities. This research represents a needed first step to assess the current state of structural, institutional support (or lack thereof) for disabled students in engineering. *In this paper, we chose to rotate between the usage of the terms “students with disabilities” (SWDs) and “disabled students” in an attempt to include all students and their identity-first or person-first language preferences.