Thoughts on HS/college degree completed with accommodations

In My Humble Opinion
61

I’m not the OP- but I must admit, I cannot imagine what sort of disability would allow someone to be capable of currently (or recently) attending college in-person ( perhaps with accommodations) but incapable of performing any type of work with or without accommodations. Not just the type of work they want to do , not just the work they are used to doing, but any work that their training/education/skills allows them to do*. Can’t work as a receptionist, cleaning houses, at Taco Bell or at a 100% remote job with completely flexible hours. It’s true that different people do well in different environments - but applying for disability benefits usually has nothing to do with whether a person does better at a strictly scheduled job or a job where they set their own schedule or whether they do better with close supervision or working independently. If there are any circumstances under which you can work - you are not eligible. In these circumstances, disability is indeed an all-or-nothing proposition - there are many other circumstances in which it is not , but in this one it is.

Someone earlier gave an example of someone with major depressive disorder who was able to to attend all the evaluations and court dates - but would end up bedridden for days afterwards. I can completely understand how that person is unable to work - but I cannot imagine that person successfully attending college in-person. To be honest, I can’t really imagine that person attending college at all - even on-line programs have deadlines that I would think that person would be unable to meet.

  • This might sound like it means their usual work - but not really. What it means is they won’t deny a 50 year old barely-literate manual laborer benefits because his disability wouldn’t prevent him from working in an office job but the fact that he is barely literate probably will. But they might deny a cashier whose back problems prevent her from standing for an eight hour shift because her disability wouldn’t prevent her from working most office jobs and as a cashier she will have the skills necessary to work as a receptionist and in other office jobs.
62

So would I. But how do you know that the problem is with that particular student’s “accommodations,” as opposed to, say, low standards of academic rigor at that particular college, or cheating by that student?

63

Your attempt to equate driving a car in traffic to packing widgets is way off track. Simple, repetitive tasks like packing widgets isn’t about concentration at all – it requires an incredibly high tolerance for boredom and/or the ability to turn your brain off completely. It’s an utterly mindless task, basically the opposite of driving across town in heavy traffic. I suspect most people who are good at one are not good at the either, regardless of disability status.

64

Yeah, but they want it both ways. I can concentrate enough to drive a lethal vehicle thru traffic when I believe it gets me something I want - but I CAN’T concentrate well enough to do a complex job. And I can socialize w/ friends, classmates and family, but not with coworkers, bosses, and customers. And then if you suggest a simple job, well, that’s too boring.

Yeah, plenty of folk will assign that person a diagnosis and make excuses for them. To me, it sounds like someone who doesn’t want to work. Show me persuasive evidence otherwise, and I’ll consider it.

65

You originally compared driving to simple tasks, like widget packing. Sounds like you’re the one who wants it both ways.

Not all complex tasks are equal – driving requires a very different skillset than, say, designing widgets, or programming an application. Interactions with coworkers, bosses, and customers aren’t socializing, they’re work relationships and should be handled very differently than friends/family. And simple tasks often are boring.

It’s hard to tell if you’re generalizing one experience to all disabled people or complaining about one person who claims disability but you don’t believe it. But it doesn’t really matter – you don’t get to decide who is ‘disabled’ and who isn’t, or what work disabled people should/shouldn’t be able to perform. Disabled people do NOT have to proof their disability to satisfy you. And your attitude is why that’s a good thing. So if you can’t accept that abilities come in infinite variety, you need to move on to a position where you don’t have to deal with this.

66

You didn’t mention the SS disability program anywhere in your OP. Your OP makes it sound like you are an employer trying to decide whether or not to hire someone who had an IEP or educational accomodations because you are skeptical their degree counts as real. This is a communication problem you seem to have that influenced the kinds of answers you received. Now I am starting to get where you’re coming from.

I don’t know anything about SSDI, I just know how it’s possible to graduate from college - even with high marks - and later struggle to hold down a job. This is literally my life. @Dinsdale, I legally emancipated when I was seventeen years old, I worked 36 hours a week to support myself while finishing high school, I graduated Salutatorian with 13 Senior Awards, and none of that makes the reality of my work limitations any less true. I could not sustain that, and my problems got significantly worse in college, where I was effectively nonfunctional. There were times I couldn’t even bathe. I’m not presenting myself as a viable candidate for SSDI, because I do work, and I have always been trying to find jobs that work, but I am presenting myself as an example of someone who has not only a BA but a Master’s degree and has been genuinely unable to hold down a job at times. We exist. And I want us to have more visibility, so I’m gonna speak up in these threads.

I agree that when the applicant has no employment history, it’s a harder call. I have a real issue with the way disability is treated in the US because it’s so all or nothing. The idea that you either can hold down a 40 hour a week job or you are completely unable to work is such nonsense. What if you can work 21 hours a week? Not enough to support yourself but not sufficient for SSDI. Are you familiar with the spoons theory of chronic illness? We only have so many spoons to get through the day. Some days we can spend those spoons on work. Other days we have to spend them on something else. That’s the reality the government seems to miss. And I do agree with you, it discourages people from finding the work that works for them.

I still find it alarming that you have employers who failed to give you any guidance on this.

67

But isn’t that his job? It’s still unclear.

That’s the problem. He has a job deciding the fate of folks who have disabilities when he doesn’t understand how many disabilities work. Social anxiety among work colleagues but not friends and family is perfectly normal. That’s generally how that condition manifests. How do you not know these things? And why are you so resistant to learning about them?

68

Individuals with social anxiety disorder vary considerably in the number and type of social situations that they fear and in the number and range of their feared outcomes. These two features (feared situations and feared outcomes) can vary independently. For example, some people fear just one or two situations but have multiple feared outcomes (such as, ‘I’ll sound boring’, ‘I’ll sweat’, ‘I’ll appear incompetent’, ‘I’ll blush’, ‘I’ll sound stupid’ or ‘I’ll look anxious’). Others can fear many situations but have only one feared outcome (such as ‘I’ll blush’). Because of this variability, researchers have considered whether it might be useful to divide social anxiety disorder into subtypes. Several subtypes have been suggested, some of which are defined by specific feared outcomes (fear of blushing, fear of sweating and so on). The most common distinction is between generalised social anxiety disorder, where individuals fear most social situations, and non-generalised social anxiety disorder, where individuals fear a more limited range of situations (which often, but not always, involve performance tasks such a public speaking); however, some authors have suggested that the difference between these subtypes is a difference in degree.

69

Agree with you here. Just because a person can attend evaluations and court hearings does NOT mean they are capable of the grind of working a regular daily job.

I am disabled due to mental issues. And so is my mother. I find it mentally exhausting to be out in public but I can usually manage to take me and/or my mother out to appointments/shopping/etc. once or twice a week. I have to sleep afterwards though to compensate from how mental exhausting it is.

My mother has chronic health issues; the few times I have had to take her to out appointments just about every weekday I was so exhausted mentally I ended sleeping most of the weekend.

And as far as driving is concerned. My mother does NOT drive; I do. I live in fairly rural area so traffic usually is not heavy and I try to schedule our appointments around the middle of the day to avoid heavy rush hour traffic. The few times my mother has had appointments with specialists in the bigger cities one of my sisters would take her.

In all honesty if I had to live in a heavily populated area I probably would NOT be driving at all. And living in a city would exacerbate my mental issues and I probably would end agoraphobic and not want leave my apartment.

70

I can’t speak to the disabilities discussion, but I do have experience with the “Does your degree/major/grades matter?” issue.

Part of my job (ad agency) was interviewing entry-level candidates. So I spent time assessing a LOT of twenty-somethings straight out of college.

Most had finished a four-year degree. But I hired some “kids” with a two-year degree, and a number who’d skipped college altogether. A few master’s degrees… and one older guy with a Ph.D. Some of these degrees were “in the field”, some not.
(Oh, and I passed on a multi-degree, mega-cum-laude, perfect-on-paper prima donna. That felt so good…)

That’s because I put almost no stock in what their degree was in*, or their grades. I cared what they could DO, what motivated them, what kind of person they were, and if they could function as a part of a team under pressure.

.

*Was that because I was a brilliant detective of human nature? Or because I knew how much slacking I did and still graduated?

71

It bears mentioning that the actual college in question matters in this calculation. Some are more rigorous than others. Of course the cool thing about my Master’s degree is I had two years of internship experience proving I could do the work. It made hiring me less of a gamble. I did well with the first job I got, spent a year unemployed, fucked up the second job, aced the third job. Fucked up the fourth and fifth job… Spent a year unemployed. All the job hopping was mostly related to my husband’s graduate school. The unemployment was depression and undiagnosed ADHD. Sixth job, current job, I have held for six years. If you put all my employers in a room together you’d think they were talking about two different people.

73

November 2021 ended just two days ago. Is this a typo?

74

Just to add, not contradict, someone I knew in personnel said that a college degree is evidence that people understand a rubric required to complete a task (which is true for each course, as well for an entire major), and that all parts need to get done, not just the ones you like.

She said a big ole red flag is someone with 200 credits (most schools with semesters require about 120 for graduation) who still can’t graduate because the credits aren’t distributed correctly.

She said that someone with a completed degree understands why an English major has to take advanced math courses, and a math major has to learn a foreign language, etc. Someone who cannot deal with the idea of general requirements, and just takes classes in things that interest them is more likely to be a problem than someone with no college, who may simply be someone whose parents didn’t have any money.

Apparently, the ability to complete a degree over time, to distribute the requirements over a four-year period, and balance the classes you like with the ones that will be tough, are valuable and the reason that many jobs require a degree, without caring what the major is.

Anyway, someone whose accommodations were not a large number of waivers of general requirements (a single waiver is a REALLY rare accommodation, IME, and usually something else is subbed in), has learned these things.

75

Yes. I meant November 2020.

76

Thank you for sharing your insights. I will consider what you have written.

77

Dinsdale’s question fundamentally seems to be whether a degree is evidence that the person can work and thus, isn’t eligible for Social Security Disability benefits. His predisposition seems to be that a degree is evidence that the person can, in fact, work. This sentence seems to suggest he’s right. You two seem to be in violent agreement. Furthermore, he seems open to learning about the situations when his predisposition is wrong. That’s a level of introspection and reaching for personal growth people should applaud. He’s taking his responsibilities very seriously to administer the program fairly and in accordance with the rules. That doesn’t mean approving every applicant (which would waste government resources we’d like to use for other things) and, he seems to realize, that perhaps it shouldn’t mean rejecting every applicant who is a recent graduate.

I suspect part of the Dinsdale’s problems are that recent graduates with IEPs could theoretically get employment of some kind if they could get the same types of accommodations in the workplace but, in the real world, there may not be such jobs available when the applicant is looking and the employers may not be willing or able to offer the same types of accommodations so that the person can work. The applicants are caught in a Catch-22. Truly disabled with some potential to do useful work but no real opportunity to ever actually do that work to sustain themselves.

The Americans with Disabilities Act means that employers should offer the disabled some reasonable accommodations to allow them to do their job. But the law is hard enough to enforce when claims are pursued by an actual employee. It’s almost impossible for a person who is never offered the job to prove that they weren’t hired because the employer could have but wouldn’t offer the particular accommodations the employee needed. So, if the person doesn’t want to starve to death, they go to the Social Security Administration and say that they are fully and permanently disabled even though, in some other universe where the ADA really ensured that disabled people weren’t discriminated against and got reasonable accommodations every time, they would be able to work.

The system is so complicated that the only practical way for people who have some disability, but not enough to qualify, is to apply and see what happens. Don’t fault them.

Depressed and bipolar people often self-medicate and become addicted. When disability was allowed for substance abuse, I suspect it was easier for many depressed and bipolar patients who were also addicts to prove the addiction. When the approval criteria changed, they all switched to trying to prove the underlying depression/bipolar disease that triggered the addiction. Don’t worry. Many of them are still addicts too they just don’t bother to tell you because, it seems, the system no longer cares.

The OP was pretty neutral. I don’t think it’s on Dinsdale that you read the OP that way. In fact, had he salted the well by mentioning disability insurance, many people would have come out of the woodwork to say that all those IEPs mean the people are very sick and almost definitely entitled to benefits when, in fact, they came out of the woodwork to say all those disabled people can work (and thus aren’t eligible for benefits).

But he’s trying to learn. What’s the matter with that?

78

I was initially under the impression that the OP was in the position of making hires rather than disability determinations. But I definitely don’t agree that a degree is evidence of anything in particular. Even well-regarded universities have bullshit pathways to graduation.

79

I’ve dealt with a lot of college students who have accommodations, and certainly I don’t think any of them were anywhere close to being “disabled” in the SSI sense of the term.

I agree that, as a general rule, having recently completed a college degree, in the absence of any obvious reason why your functioning has significantly declined since graduation, is a strong point against your qualifying for SSI.

On the other hand, many mental illnesses are episodic. If someone has just completed their Master’s degree in twelve years, after having withdrawn from classes in most semesters due to crippling depression…you can do that in college, but there are very few jobs where being able to function one-third of the time will be considered good enough. So each case has to be considered individually.

80

Is this another one of those neutral ways of talking about the situation?

He asked whether a degree is evidence “of accomplishment,” or if that is not true when it comes to a person who has gotten disability accommodations. He asked that question in two different ways, and when people gave him the answer he needed, which was that to have a meaningful conversation about those questions you have to understand what disability accommodations are, he said that everyone was arguing with him about the definition of disability, and that he wasn’t talking about disability, and also that nobody but him understands SSDI, which he hadn’t mentioned in any way.

He could have just said “oh yeah, right, actually I’m talking about this through the lens of declaring someone permanently disabled in a SSD context, meaning that my question is really is there a strong inverse correlation between someone being able to complete a college degree with accommodation, and that same person being incapable of performing any substantial gainful activity,” and gotten different feedback. I’m sure there is a reason he hasn’t done that.

81

Yep. Also, IMHO, what some have posted here about degrees is a bit disturbing.