College Students with Physical Disabilities: Common On Campus, Uncommon in the Literature

Abstract

Programs for college students with physical disabilities began in the immediate post-war period, as veterans with disabilities were the “vanguard” disability group in higher education. However, while veterans with physical disabilities were the beginning of the postsecondary disability field, the discipline currently focuses on students with many and varied disability types in both its research and practice. This article presents a secondary analysis, which was part of a larger systematic review of the postsecondary disability literature. The present article focuses on studies including at least one participant with a physical disability. In total eighty studies had at least one student with a physical disability. Two of these studies were experimental and only one of these two met the criteria to be a randomized control trial. A minority of studies was composed solely of college students with physical disabilities.