The Autism College Connection

On top of the accommodations from the Office of Disability Services, most schools offer students access to counseling services, tutoring, and academic coaching. Many neurodiverse students can benefit from that extra help. Let’s talk about counseling services today. 

Almost every college has a counseling department because college is stressful, and young people live stressful lives. Without this in-house support, the college dropout rate would be even higher. Since colleges are under a lot of pressure to increase their four-year and six-year graduation rates, they need to provide students with therapy to get them over the finish line.

The counseling department at Stevens Institute of Technology,⁠ for example, offers individual and group counseling. The website says that this therapy is aimed at providing short-term help with depression, anxiety, stress, parental relationships, intimate relationships, and roommate conflict. Students also have limited psychiatric services if they can’t get this help through their insurance, as well as free and unlimited telehealth.

Some autistic students can be just fine with the generic counseling, while others might need help with autism-specific issues.

For example, most typical colleges aren’t set up to help a student who is obsessed with musical theater and stays up until 5:00 am, compulsively watching videos from Hamilton and Wicked. They can’t help a lonely student who doesn’t have sufficient social skills to engage in a conversation with a peer. They can’t provide support to a student with OCD who emails his professors multiple times per day to ask questions about homework and grades.

If a student needs an extra level of therapy for their autistic needs, they should consider colleges that offer autism support services. Examples include RIT’s Spectrum Support Program, Ramapo College’s Enhance Program, and Fairleigh Dickinson University’s COMPASS program. 

When shopping for colleges, parents should make appointments with the counseling department, along with the tutoring department and the disability offices, to make sure that the school offers their students the right help.