When Rob Hurtekant was studying in South Africa, he ran into some roadblocks. Literally. Sometimes when he crossed a street in Cape Town, there would be a curb cut on one side of the street, but not on the other. That wasn’t helpful for a young man in a wheelchair.
“I had to learn how to jump my chair over the curbs,” Mr. Hurtekant recalls. “You don’t necessarily see too many South Africans in wheelchairs out and about. So the people would see me jump the curb and would come over to me and say ‘daar’s hy,’ which is Afrikaans for kind of ‘good job!’ I think I opened their eyes a little bit.”
For Mr. Hurtekant, a student at Georgetown University at the time (he is now pursuing a master’s degree in African Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles), studying abroad wasn’t just fun. After working with kids at a school for children with disabilities in South Africa, it changed the trajectory of his life.
Stephanie Woodward, a senior at St. John Fisher College, who studied at Dublin City University in Ireland last year, believes that experience has brought her numerous opportunities she would have missed otherwise. “I use a motorized wheelchair,” she says. “I figured, if I can’t get past something, I’ll just run over it.”
Mr. Hurtekant and Ms. Woodward are shining examples of the positive things that can happen when students with disabilities choose to study abroad. Both were born with spina bifida, a developmental spine defect that can lead to varying degrees of disability. But educators and disability-rights advocates wish there were more students as determined to study abroad as were Mr. Hurtekant and Ms. Woodward.
Only 2.6 percent of the students who studied abroad for credit in 2006-7 reported having some kind of disability, according to the Institute of International Education, whose annual “Open Doors” report only recently began including such data. Of those, about half had a learning disability, one-quarter had a mental disability, 8 percent had a physical disability, and 5.8 percent had a sensory disability.
“They may well be undercounted,” says Richard Gaulton, director of Cornell University’s Cornell Abroad program. “Many of the students with learning disabilities are part of the pool now, and they may not think of themselves or disclose themselves as disabled.”
Mobility International USA, an advocacy group for people with disabilities, made similar estimates about a decade ago, says Cerise Roth-Vinson, the group’s director of administration. “I think there’s still a lot of work to be done,” she says.
Nationally, 10.8 percent of all undergraduates reported a disability of some kind in 2007-8, according to Education Department statistics. Of those, 19.2 percent had an attention-deficit disorder; 15.4 percent had an orthopedic disability; 13.3 percent suffered from depression; and 10.8 percent reported a mental illness.
There are many reasons for the small number of students with disabilities studying abroad.
“Kids subconsciously say, ‘It’s not possible, it’ll be too hard,’ when they don’t realize what they can do,” says Mr. Hurtekant.
The lack of self-esteem may also result from the negative messages that many students with disabilities receive as they grow up, says Angela Winfield, a blind lawyer in Syracuse, N.Y. As a student at Columbia University she studied abroad at Queen Mary, a college of the University of London. “A lot of students had so much trouble getting simple accommodations at their local high schools, they think, ‘If I have this much trouble here, how am I going to go abroad?’” Study-abroad Web sites have very little information, she adds.
The colleges themselves also bear some of the responsibility for the low participation rates, say advocates for those with disabilities. “Over all, colleges are doing a much better job than they used to,” says Ms. Roth-Vinson. “We’d like them to do more. They could work more with disability-services offices. We’ll ask them, ‘Have you dropped the study-abroad brochures off at the disability-services offices?’ and they haven’t. Also, there could be more training of study-abroad advisers about working with students with disabilities.”
Cornell’s Mr. Gaulton says his program has worked closely with the university’s disability office ever since he began working there, in part because he helped a blind student study abroad during his first year on the job.
Ms. Woodward says when she first wheeled into St. John Fisher’s study-abroad office, she didn’t exactly get a positive message. But she didn’t care. “When I did show interest, they seemed flabbergasted, like, ‘I’m not sure if you can,’” she says. “I didn’t need their permission; I was going to go anyway.”
Some administrators may worry privately about costs, but others say that accommodating students with disabilities can often be done without spending a lot. “Our policy has been, if a student wants to study abroad, we’re going to do everything we can to accommodate them,” says Kirsten Eller Laufer, a study-abroad adviser at the University of Florida’s International Center. “We’ve helped a blind student study abroad. We’ve gotten them full note-takers with assistance—whatever we could to make sure that it’s not just an option for the typical able-bodied study-abroad student.”
Advocates for those with disabilities are hopeful that the number who study abroad will rise over time, and as people become more willing to report special needs. Ms. Woodward purposely didn’t disclose that she used a wheelchair during the application process, but mentioned it after she was accepted.
“I would urge people not to be scared to report,” says Brian D. Harley, director of programs for study abroad at Purdue University, one of the institutions cited in Open Doors for sending relatively large numbers of students with disabilities abroad. He says it’s not for reasons of bias that they want disclosure, but “so that we can get the proper accommodations. We’re all for getting more diversity, more students from all groups.”
Ms. Roth-Vinson of Mobility International predicts that more students with disabilities will study abroad, both because of growing interest in global affairs, and because the current generation is the first that was brought up with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990. Students with disabilities who study abroad may get more out of their experience than other students, Ms. Roth-Vinson says, because of what she calls a “trampoline effect.”
“For people with disabilities, there is such a high unemployment rate and a high amount of underemployment,” she says. “When they study abroad, they look really good to employers. If you can study for a semester in Peru, you can certainly handle this desk job.”
