There's something about the move from high school to college that I don't think we talk about nearly enough.
In high school, if a student has an IEP or a 504 plan, there's a whole system responsible for making sure those supports actually happen. Teachers know about the accommodations. Parents get invited to meetings. Someone else schedules the evaluations, tracks the paperwork, and keeps the plan updated. Support comes looking for you.
Then the student graduates, and almost overnight, that responsibility becomes theirs. Now they're expected to figure out what services exist, find the right office, gather documentation, talk to professors, and make sure their accommodations are actually implemented. All while adjusting to a new campus, a new schedule, and, for many, a new life away from the adults who used to remember things for them.
I work with students on executive functioning, and this has always struck me as a strange design choice. We take students who have spent years receiving structured support, remove most of that structure, and expect them to navigate the process of getting it back on their own. When they struggle, we call it a problem with their readiness for college. But what if part of the problem is how we've designed the transition?
First, a little background
In K–12 public schools, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) includes what's called a Child Find obligation: schools are responsible for identifying and evaluating students who may need special education services. The system doesn't always work well, as anyone who has navigated special education knows. But there's an established process, and the responsibility doesn't rest entirely on the student.
College is different. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, colleges must provide appropriate accommodations to eligible students, but students generally have to start that process themselves. They need to disclose their disability, provide documentation, and formally request accommodations, and at some schools, renew those requests or contact each professor every semester.
None of those steps is especially hard on its own. Together, they add up to a substantial executive function task, and the timing couldn't be worse.
As a developmental researcher, I'd add one more layer. The brain systems that support executive function are still maturing through adolescence and into early adulthood (Larsen & Luna, 2018). So we're handing one of the biggest administrative loads of a young person's life to a brain that is, quite literally, still under construction, during a season of enormous change and stress. And acute stress can disrupt the very prefrontal functions that support planning and working memory (Arnsten, 2009).
The numbers surprised me
The National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 followed students who had been identified with disabilities in secondary school. Among those who went on to postsecondary education (Newman et al., 2011):
87% had received supports in high school
28% disclosed their disability to their college
19% received accommodations there
I had to sit with those numbers for a minute. These are students who had already been identified as needing support, and most had received it. Yet fewer than one in three told their college. A more recent federal study found a similar pattern: 37% of students who had a disability in college informed their institution (Adam & Warner-Griffin, 2022).
To be fair, not every student who had accommodations in high school will need them in college. Needs change and students build skills. The earlier study found that 63% of students identified with disabilities in high school no longer considered themselves to have a disability by the time they reached postsecondary school. For some, that probably reflects real change. For others, I wonder whether the label disappeared along with the system that assigned it. The study can't tell us, but I think it's worth asking.
So why aren't students asking for help?
Lyman and colleagues (2016) interviewed 16 college students who had already been approved for accommodations but weren't using them. These students knew the services existed and had gone through the whole process. Some wanted to prove they could succeed on their own. Some worried about how professors or classmates would see them. Some didn't understand how to use their accommodations or doubted they would help. Some had already had negative experiences with faculty, and some worried about what disclosing might mean for their future. A review of 23 studies found many of the same barriers (Toutain, 2019).
What stands out to me is how little most of these obstacles have to do with whether a student actually needs accommodations. A student can need extended testing time and still feel embarrassed asking for it. They can be fully capable of college-level work and still struggle to start an email to disability services. Those are different skills, and we don't always treat them that way.
"Lucky to be here"
There's another barrier I rarely see named. From the first week of ninth grade, students hear that their grades finally "count," and that a decent living requires a degree. Then they spend senior year writing personal statements about why they're exceptional, why they'll succeed, and why this school is the perfect fit. The whole process is an exercise in proving they are worth choosing.
So when the acceptance letter arrives, many students don't feel entitled to anything. They feel lucky. And when you feel lucky to be somewhere, the last thing you want to do is rock the boat, or walk into an office in your first month and announce that you might need extra help.
I couldn't find a study that tests this dynamic directly, so I want to be clear that this is my hypothesis, not an established finding. But it lines up with what students in the research do say: they want to prove they can succeed on their own, avoid negative reactions, protect how they see themselves, and avoid future consequences (Lyman et al., 2016; Marshak et al., 2010). You can see how easily "I'm afraid they'll regret admitting me" could grow out of that.
Admissions rules may reinforce the silence, too. Colleges that receive federal funding generally can't ask applicants about disability before admission (Admissions and Recruitment, 2025). That protects students from discrimination, as it should. But it also means the first conversation about disability usually happens right after admission, when students feel they have the most to lose.
"Prove it again"
The second barrier comes with a price tag. Many students are identified in elementary or middle school and move through the public school system with an IEP or 504 plan for years. Then they arrive at college and are asked for newer testing. Some colleges require evaluations no more than five years old (U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2024).
That can mean months of waiting for an appointment, the testing itself, and more waiting for a report that often confirms what the student has known about themselves for most of their life. College disability officials told the GAO that evaluations cost "$1,000 to over $3,000" and can be "prohibitively expensive," and that students may go without accommodations while they wait (GAO, 2024).
In a 2024 national survey of young adults with learning disabilities, 57% of those in college said their school accepted their existing IEP, 504 plan, or evaluation. Forty percent had to complete a new full evaluation, and 8% of those never could (Rodrigo et al., 2024). Those numbers only include students who had already disclosed. I suspect many more hear "new testing," see the price and the wait, and quietly decide to manage on their own. The data can't tell us how many, but I'd be surprised if the number were small.
What makes this especially frustrating is that the field's own professional association has argued against it since 2012. Its guidance says documentation should be "current and relevant but not necessarily 'recent,'" that an IEP or 504 plan plus a conversation with the student is often enough, and that colleges "cannot create documentation processes that are burdensome" (Association on Higher Education And Disability [AHEAD], 2012). Not every campus follows it. The federal RISE Act would require colleges to accept IEPs and 504 plans as documentation; it passed the Senate HELP Committee unanimously in July 2026 but has not yet become law (New America, 2026).
The executive function problem nobody talks about
Public administration researchers have a name for this: administrative burden. Moynihan and colleagues (2015) describe three kinds of costs people face when trying to access public services:
Learning costs: figuring out what exists, whether you qualify, and how to get it
Compliance costs: forms, documentation, deadlines, and procedures
Psychological costs: the stress, stigma, and uncertainty of going through the process
When I read that framework, I immediately thought about executive function. We're asking students to plan ahead, organize paperwork, start uncomfortable tasks, remember deadlines, communicate with unfamiliar adults, and follow up when something doesn't happen. That's executive functioning. For a student with ADHD who struggles with exactly those skills, the process of getting help requires the very abilities they need help with.
We've built a system in which accessing support depends, at least in part, on being able to function without it. And then we wonder why students don't follow through.
But do accommodations actually help?
It's a fair question. Kim and Lee (2016) looked at 1,248 students registered with disability services at Penn State. Test accommodations (like extended time) and course accommodations were significantly associated with overall GPA, even after accounting for demographics and disability type. That doesn't prove the accommodations caused the difference; students who use them may differ in other ways. But it challenges the idea that accommodations are just administrative formalities, and it makes the barriers to getting them worth taking seriously.
What I'd tell families before their student leaves for college
I wouldn't wait for the first semester. I'd start during senior year, so students understand the system before everything else about college starts competing for their attention.
1. Get the paperwork before graduation. Request copies of the most recent IEP or 504 plan and any evaluations. Ask the college directly whether it will accept them or require updated testing. If it requires new testing, start scheduling early in senior year, since appointments can take months.
2. Contact disability services before there's a problem. Reach out the summer before the first semester. Students don't have to use every accommodation they're approved for, but understanding the options ahead of time is far easier than navigating the process after falling behind.
3. Find out what happens each semester. At some colleges, students need to request new accommodation letters every term. Find out what needs to happen and when, then put it on the calendar as an actual task with an actual date.
4. Make the uncomfortable parts easier to start. Help your student draft a simple email template for professors before the semester begins. For students who struggle with task initiation, having the first step done can make a real difference.
5. Don't confuse independence with doing everything alone. This is the point I care about most. Most adults rely on calendars, reminders, accountants, and all kinds of outside systems. Students should be learning how to find and use supports that work for them. Sometimes that means a parent sitting beside them while they fill out the application, or saying, "Let's figure out who you need to email," instead of sending the email for them. In a large experiment on financial aid, hands-on help completing the application worked better than information alone (Bettinger et al., 2012). That study wasn't about disability accommodations, but the principle holds: knowing what to do and being able to follow through are not the same thing.
Maybe we need to rethink what "college ready" means
When we ask whether a student is ready for college, we usually focus on academics, maturity, motivation, and independence. Those matter. But a student can understand the material and still forget to submit an accommodation request. They can be highly motivated and still have trouble starting a task that involves uncertainty or possible rejection. That doesn't tell us whether they belong in college. It tells us about the demands we're placing on them.
Institutions have a role to play, too. We spend a lot of time asking how students can improve their executive functioning. Maybe we should also ask whether our systems require more executive functioning than they need to. Could the process be easier to find, the steps clearer, the documentation requirements less burdensome? Especially when the students who struggle most to navigate the system may be the ones who would benefit most from it.
I'm not arguing that we should remove every challenge. Building those skills matters. But there's a difference between helping someone build independence and making support contingent on already having it, and I think we've blurred that line.
Needing help with the accommodation process doesn't mean a student isn't ready for college. Sometimes it means the process is harder than it needs to be.
Borrow mine while I help you build yours.
If you're preparing for the transition to college, or supporting a student who is, I offer executive function coaching at surrogatefrontallobe.com. You can also find me on Instagram at @surrogatefrontallobe.
This article is for educational purposes and is not legal advice, therapy, diagnosis, or treatment.
References
Adam, T., & Warner-Griffin, C. (2022). Use of supports among students with disabilities and special needs in college (NCES 2022-071). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2022/2022071.pdf
Admissions and Recruitment, 34 C.F.R. § 104.42 (2025).
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Association on Higher Education And Disability. (2012). Supporting accommodation requests: Guidance on documentation practices. https://www.ahead.org/professional-resources/accommodations/documentation
Bettinger, E. P., Long, B. T., Oreopoulos, P., & Sanbonmatsu, L. (2012). The role of application assistance and information in college decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(3), 1205–1242. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs017
Kim, W. H., & Lee, J. (2016). The effect of accommodation on academic performance of college students with disabilities. Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 60(1), 40–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034355215605259
Larsen, B., & Luna, B. (2018). Adolescence as a neurobiological critical period for the development of higher-order cognition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 94, 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.09.005
Lyman, M., Beecher, M. E., Griner, D., Brooks, M., Call, J., & Jackson, A. (2016). What keeps students with disabilities from using accommodations in postsecondary education? A qualitative review. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 29(2), 123–140.
Marshak, L., Van Wieren, T., Ferrell, D. R., Swiss, L., & Dugan, C. (2010). Exploring barriers to college student use of disability services and accommodations. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 22(3), 151–165.
Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu009
New America. (2026, July 30). Senate committee passes RISE Act, easing path to accommodations for college students with disabilities. https://www.newamerica.org/insights/senate-committee-passes-rise-act-easing-path-to-accommodations-for-college-students-with-disabilities/
Newman, L., Wagner, M., Knokey, A.-M., Marder, C., Nagle, K., Shaver, D., & Wei, X. (2011). The post-high school outcomes of young adults with disabilities up to 8 years after high school: A report from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2) (NCSER 2011-3005). SRI International. https://ies.ed.gov/ncser/pubs/20113005/
Rodrigo, S. A., Wong, L. N., Harris, S. L., Wilson, S. E., Malone, A. S., Stelitano, L., Fuller, N., Kubatzky, L., Gage, N. A., Blackorby, J., & LeBoyd, N. (2024). The state of learning disabilities: Navigating the transition to adulthood. National Center for Learning Disabilities. https://ncld.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/031925-SoLD-Report-YA-Transition.pdf
Toutain, C. (2019). Barriers to accommodations for students with disabilities in higher education: A literature review. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 32(3), 297–310.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2024). Higher education: Education could improve information on accommodations for students with disabilities (GAO-24-105614). https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-105614.pdf