Disability - Disability And Educational Attainment

Disabled American adults lag behind the adult population at large in terms of their educational attainment. The graph presents two year's worth of data on educational attainment of the severely disabled by highest level of education completed. Triangle markers have been charted for the educational attainment of the general population in 2001 for comparison.

Some progress has been made in reducing the gap during the period shown, 1995 and 2001. The lighter bars are for the year 1995. The darker bars are for the year 2000; they show that a growing percentage of severely disabled people are taking college courses and earning degrees. Nonetheless, in 2001 among severely disabled adults aged 16 through 64 years one third had never finished high school (33%) and more than two thirds had at best a high school degree (71%). For the general adult population these figures were 18% and 48% respectively.

As one moves up the educational ladder this difference increases. In 2001, within the general population, 52% of adults aged 16 through 64 years had taken some college courses after graduating from high school, and 24% of them had earned a bachelor's or higher degree. Of the severely disabled population, fewer than one third of adults (29%) had studied at the college level and only 8% had a bachelor's or higher degree.

Although these differences are large, it's worth noting that parity in educational attainment for the general population and the severely disabled population is not a realistic goal. The category "all severely disabled persons" includes many people with serious cognitive impairments. By their very nature many of these impairments make scholastic achievements impossible. Cognitive impairments cover a range of diseases and disorders such as dyslexia, Alzheimer's disease, mental retardation, Parkinson's disease, stroke, autism, head injury, and/or AIDS dementia.

What might be far more instructive is to compare educational attainment in the general population with attainment by those with a physical disability, precluding all those with a cognitive impairment. This, however, is not possible with the data now available.

A person's educational attainment has direct bearing on his/her employment opportunities. The next panel will look at employment rates in the disabled community.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Disability: Selected Characteristics of Persons 16 to 74: 2001, Table 1.,"Selected Characteristics of Civilians 16 to 74 Years Old with a Work Disability, by Educational Attainment and Sex: 2001," October 2000, available online at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disable/cps/cps101.html.