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Are we failing too many neurodivergent students? In this Higher Ed Careers interview, the director of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Neurodiversity and Employment Innovation discusses the barriers that neurodivergent students face in securing employment and how colleges and universities can do better by this population.
Leah Jackson, HigherEdJobs: The Werth Institute’s Center for Neurodiversity & Employment Innovation at UConn has been leading the charge for changing the narrative around employment opportunities for neurodivergent graduates (defined in a recent article from UConn as “people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia, and other neurological differences”). What sparked this initiative, and why is it so critical?
Judy Reilly, Director of the Center for Neurodiversity and Employment Innovation, University of Connecticut: It’s so critical of the numbers — the number of people who are being excluded from employment opportunities commensurate with their aptitude, with their potential. Somebody is underemployed when they’re working below where their talent and interests lie. If somebody’s happy where they are, that’s fine. But when people who have the aptitude for professional level employment, for thinking, for contributing in professional roles, are either unemployed or underemployed because of barriers related to their neurodiversity, that’s not ok. Oftentimes, those are college-capable individuals. That means that they have that college-level drive, intelligence, and interest, but oftentimes, don’t persist through college and reach graduation due to the lack of support.
What sparked the initiative is that under- and unemployment for neurodivergent college graduates is a substantial problem in terms of access to opportunities, being screened out based on neurotypical standards and measures, and thus blocked from the independent life and contributions they want to make. It is also coupled with a crisis in talent. Organizations and companies are struggling to find the talent they need and are often competing for that talent, so they’re looking at innovative ways to tap into new pools and diversity. The business benefits of diversity have been well documented, and companies are very focused on bringing those benefits to their organizations. Neurodiversity is diversity of the brain, diversity of thought. It’s another way that companies are opening up to this idea of including people with different ways of thinking and different skills and perspectives to bring to solving problems.
Jackson: What are some of the challenges or barriers that neurodivergent individuals face with finding employment? Are general career services offices on campus unprepared to assist with these specific challenges?
Reilly: It ends up being very sequential, that is, you have the challenges that I talked about in the education journey. Maybe your grades don’t reflect your actual intelligence because you have dyslexia or executive functioning challenges. You can’t necessarily persist in work production or go at the pace that a course is going at because you process information more slowly. So, your educational “credentials” are impacted, things that employers look at.
Next is the job search. When a student gets to that place where they are searching for a job, whether it be an internship to develop skills or for full-time employment after college, a job search is its own massive organization and time management demand. Applying, networking, emailing, interviewing — it’s a very socially intensive process which is not always a strength, and importantly, not always a requirement of the actual job one is pursuing. And as mentioned, the screen-out criteria that organizations often have work against these students. Somebody with limited work experience because they’ve had barriers all along, or someone with a lower GPA right out of school because they’ve had barriers, but with the raw skills and talent for the job, will be excluded right away. The metrics used to determine whether somebody will get an interview are problematic. But then, for people who do get interviews, we’re talking about sometimes unusual behaviors, and that can be anything from things we can see, like maybe it’s a stimming behavior for calming anxiety or fueling attention, or maybe it’s a motor tick. Maybe it’s a very pedantic way of speaking. Sometimes it’s not visible, it’s organization. It’s organizing your thoughts in a way that you can present them to somebody in a high-stress situation like an interview. Interview success becomes really challenging in getting that offer.
Keeping the employment entails a whole set of other supports as well as education on the employer’s side.
Career services offices on campus are somewhat unprepared to assist, though some are better than others. Neurodivergent folks don’t access career services all that readily because the staff aren’t necessarily going to understand those behaviors and learning differences — they are likely to misinterpret them the same way that these students have been misinterpreted their entire lives by teachers, other adults, and peers. For career services to do better by this crowd, there must be collaboration with the staff on campus who are serving these students in an academic capacity or a social skills or mental health capacity. They have the knowledge about neurodiversity that career services offices need but don’t always have the bandwidth to take on the employment and career services role as well as the academic accommodations and support role. Although, some schools have done that through their neurodiversity or autism or disability office, which is fantastic.
Jackson: Why is neurodiversity often overlooked in college and university DEI efforts? What are some actions that colleges and universities can take to better serve this population?
Reilly: That’s such a good question. It’s the same reason it has been overlooked in the employment realm. It’s just beginning to build traction in large organizations as part of equity and inclusion. Oftentimes, people think about diversity in pre-programmed ways, usually from a social, cultural, or gender perspective. While everybody is different cognitively, there’s a cohesive group of cognitive functioning that falls within what’s typical, called “neurotypical.” Then, there are people whose brain functioning falls outside of that, but whose intelligence is not only average, it’s often above average, but they have just been overlooked for a whole host of reasons.
To better serve this population, colleges and universities can take similar actions to what we’re doing in the employment realm. We must educate people who serve and work alongside neurodivergent students, so that they know exactly what it is, how it presents, and what they can do differently. Faculty may also need to adjust content delivery formats and learning outcomes to account for all kinds of learners.
Jackson: What is the University Council for Neurodiversity Employment that UConn has launched, and how can other colleges and universities get involved?
Reilly: The University council is a coalition of over 50 colleges and universities from across the country who’ve come together to work on this issue collectively instead of in silos. UConn leads that council because we don’t just want to fix things on our campus. We’re committed to effecting change across colleges and universities. So, we focus on that career services part that involves understanding the neurodiversity employment landscape: Who are the companies doing this? Who’s doing it well? How do we connect our students and the right students with those companies? Then, we’re looking at best practices and programs for employment readiness through college for ND students, possibly even something certificate-based, that colleges can implement more widely.
Any college or university can get involved. We ask for a representative from both a campus career services department as well as someone with a disability or neurodiversity support role, so that we can standardize collaboration efforts across schools.
Jackson: The center is also leading the Mentra pilot program. Tell us about this program and the possibilities it holds for boosting employment rates for neurodivergent individuals.
Reilly: Mentra is a for-profit startup company that aggregates neurodivergent job seekers and the companies who are interested in tapping into that talent — and they’ve done it with a very candidate-centric lens. Candidates fill out a profile, and Mentra walks them through a rigorous and robust profile development process so that they can mine for their talents, skills, and interests and showcase their work experience or talent in non-traditional ways. These students often don’t have work experience, and companies can simply match with their profile, instead of students applying one by one to companies. It’s almost like a common app or a reverse career fair. We are exploring whether this solution can help at the post-secondary level.
It’s almost like the analog for Handshake, but this is for the neurodivergent population. The pilot program has 30 universities and colleges across the country using the tool this year, and then we will evaluate ways to improve the technology going forward.
Jackson: Please tell us about your path to your current role.
Reilly: I currently serve as the director of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Neurodiversity and Employment Innovation. The path that led me here stems from two fields of interest. One is neurodiversity itself, and that involves the ways that people learn, communicate, and perceive the world differently, such that they fall outside of expectations upon which our biggest systems and institutions are built. Education is set up with expectations that you will develop, learn, and perform in certain ways, but that is inconsistent with the experience of kids who have autism, executive functioning challenges, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia, or other learning differences. I study and have opened a practice to support families and individuals whose neurodivergence or learning difference creates significant challenges for them in pursuing and completing education, pursuing and securing employment, keeping employment, and maintaining social and family relationships. These pieces of life get interrupted when you have these differences that other people don’t understand.
The other pillar of my background is in business education and training. So, in addition to an advocacy lens for these individuals, I bring a set of management skills and organizational understanding to efficiently pursue and secure the types of changes we need. There are many different priorities in large bureaucratic systems like schools or companies, and integrating the needs of both sides is an art.
My current role has narrowed my focus to employment. That involves education because it is the path to employment, but my goal is to educate employers about the value neurodivergent employees bring to their organizations as well as implement changes to support and include more people who have these learning differences. These are people who otherwise don’t make it through the screening process, and if they manage to secure employment, they often cannot retain it.
UConn is seeking to work on this problem broadly, so we are focusing on scalable solutions on a global level — not just for the UConn population or the state of Connecticut.
What keeps you engaged working in higher education?
Reilly: I know how hard neurodivergent students at this level are working, and I want to continue supporting those who are fighting so hard for a meaningful post-college life. I want to be someone they can count on.