UC disability services require a transformative investment

Sheilds Library at UC Davis.

Credit: Karin HIggins/UC Davis

The UC system is failing its disabled students.

Across campuses, disability support services responsible for providing students with the accommodations they need to keep up with our abled peers report that they are overworked and understaffed. If the University of California hopes to reach its ambitious goals to close equity gaps, reduce time to degree, and improve workforce outcomes — all while adding nearly 13,000 new undergraduates in the next several years — the system must radically improve the support available to disabled students, who make up at least 19% of the university’s population. Disabled-student programs (DSPs) at the UC employ “disability specialists” to coordinate course accommodations like flexible deadlines and extended time on tests. They also provide essential services like remote access, text-to-speech software and American Sign Language interpretation or Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) services, that are necessary for engaging with communities inside the classroom.

However, as a disabled student myself, I’ve often given up relying on my specialist because the turnaround time was so long. Instead, I’ve had to advocate to professors directly — with limited success. This story isn’t unique to me. We frequently have to wait three weeks (or longer) to receive an email response, and DSP specialists are usually even less available to meet in person.

A lack of resources is the issue. Disabled-students specialists are required by law to work with each student individually to provide academic accommodations. Currently, national standards by the Association on Higher Education And Disability recommend that one specialist work with no more than 250 students. At UC, according to our conversations with DSP directors across the system, the average is about one specialist for every 500-1,000 students.

These overwhelming numbers have led most programs to require students to fill out long questionnaires and submit doctor’s forms, well beyond what is legally mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act, in an effort to streamline intake. These become access barriers that disproportionately hurt low-income students who cannot afford the time or money for a doctor’s visit; students with marginalized genders, whose gender presentation doesn’t match that of a “typical” patient with the condition; and students of color who face medical racism that affects the way doctors understand their symptoms.

Begging our professors to take our personal hardships seriously as proof that we “deserve” accommodations, repeatedly explaining to instructors how to use technology like microphones or closed captioning, and finding conflict-mediation resources that can address faculty’s ableism are just a few examples of the everyday emotional labor that saps our time and energy. I’ve had friends who have been forced to take “incompletes” for their classes because they weren’t able to coordinate accommodations for their classes in a timely manner. One friend had to commit to a fifth year at the UC because they couldn’t get help coordinating virtual access for their classes when their university-owned apartment’s elevator was broken.

The hours spent wrangling daunting amounts of documentation or self-advocating to professors take time away from staying on top of coursework or building friendships. The university itself is built on notions of exclusivity, its service of the “best and brightest.” For students that move, act, communicate, or behave differently, ableist standards disregard our existence within this population. Inadequate services function to push disabled students out.

And the costs are palpable: the UC’s own data from the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey 2020 shows that, compared with nondisabled students, disabled students feel significantly lower levels of satisfaction and belonging, with 74% of disabled undergraduates reporting that they feel belonging on their campus compared with abled undergraduate students at 86% satisfaction.

It is time for the UC to acknowledge our presence and belonging, and provide us the support services to ensure we can access the same academic, social and career opportunities the university affords able-bodied people. We make up the largest minority group in the country, with 26% of Americans having some type of disability, yet our access needs are overlooked.

These students need champions — in the Office of the President, the state Legislature, among faculty, and on the board of regents — who will begin the work now to make these transformations happen and recommit UC to its stated values on behalf of tens of thousands of disabled UC students.

Increasing the staffing capacity of disability support services across the UC is the right place to start. These efforts create the potential for each campus to have a diverse staff to meet the diverse support needs of a diverse disabled student population. Specialists could lend their expertise to offer students access-informed career mentorship or connect them with affordable, culturally responsive health care or accessible housing. Disabled-student programs could have the capacity to easily coordinate translation services in and out of the classroom, and dispatch ASL interpreters to every campus event. Professionals and staff with lived experience could help campus administration identify access issues in existing and planned infrastructure, or work with faculty to actively implement disability-friendly course policies. With such engagement, more students might not need to request accommodations at all.

Finally, staff could provide invaluable community spaces for students to connect, helping close the 12% gap in the number of disabled students who report feeling a sense of belonging at UC compared with abled students. For tens of thousands of disabled students — particularly the multiply marginalized disabled students of color who are more likely to face additional barriers to access due to misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis — this relatively minor investment could see outsize reductions in time to degree, workforce outcomes, graduation rates and student belonging.

Hiring staff that reflect the multiple identities of disabled students can also serve as a foundation for a range of other solutions that will transform the UC into a university where access is abundant and disabled students can thrive. Needing a doctor’s note, learning disability reevaluations, or formal diagnoses should not be barriers to accessing needed services.

With a transformative investment in disability services, we can imagine new possibilities for disabled students to find the belonging and equal opportunity that we deserve.

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Marvia Cunanan is a recent graduate from UC Santa Barbara who is autistic and has ADHD. Marvia is the former co-chair of the Associated Students UCSB Commission on Disability Equity, and continues to do community work as a programming assistant at the UCSB MultiCultural Center.

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