I know a student who attended a very prestigious school, often mentioned here on CC. Very high IQ and Asperger’s, ran into huge social difficulties her first semester and also suffered from depression. She moved home and attended her local school, Nassau Community College on Long Island, which has a twice-exceptional support program, the Achilles program. She was much happier, maintained a perfect GPA and moved on to a SUNY school, also near home. In her case living at home seemed to make a big difference.
One of my all time favorite students (class of 2017) was twice exceptional. Applied ED to Davidson, and is having a great freshman year
I too have a 2E friend. Tried a prestigious school 2000 miles from home. Just too much for her to handle adjusting to taking care of her school, social, living, medical situations all at once. She had a good time in high school, but she concentrated on studying and usually only one or two ECs at a time and adjusting to college with a 24/7 week was just too much. She too moved home, commutes to a very nice 4 year university, is looking for grad schools and not looking too far! I think what will be the most likely outcome is the state flagship which is about 45 minutes from home and she’ll be there Monday thru Thurs or Fri and then home for the weekend. She really enjoys being at home as she likes to cook, read, do activities with family and friends and her church. She’s just much happier with a quiet lifestyle.
OP, my story is not happy, but it’s food for thought. My middle son is very 2E- ID’d PG, but also has T1 Diabetes, depression, OCD, anxieties, math disability and a writing disability. He tested very well on the SAT (2230) back in in 2014, good on two SAT IIs (730, 710), and had mostly As, was homeschooled/dual-enrolled, and was (is still) a serious cellist animator-wanna be.
He had accommodations on the SAT, etc., but chose not to use them at the local CC. He was full time at the local CC in his senior year, but that’s miles away academically from where he ended up, unfortunately. He applied to 23 (!) schools because 1) he was looking for one affordable school (we were Pell Grant that year) 2) he didn’t have a perfect GPA, and had weaknesses, so we weren’t sure where he’d get in, if anywhere.
In the end, he somehow got into one of his high reaches, Penn. In the spring of his senior year, he knew he wasn’t ready to go to college, so he had to take a gap year. That forced him to have to choose a private school that allowed a gap year. Up to then, he was choosing mostly between UC Irvine (Computer Game Science) and Penn (fantastic aid, Fine Arts major with lots of animation courses, and a gap year) among other schools (Purdue, U Rochester, UCSD, CSU Fullerton for animation). He chose Penn.
It was a terrible fit, and I didn’t want him to go at all, but he insisted, even though he was struggling the summer before he left. I can say that their disability office was fantastic. They were wonderful, and tried to help as best as they could, but he was academically under-prepared (though I think he could have made a go of it if he’d not been struggling with OCD/anxieties), and mentally not ready to be across the country from home (away from home for the very first time ever except for a few short trips here and there). He was a fish out of water in most ways-a 2E non-competitive creative introvert musician at Penn did not go over well, and he was back home before mid-November.
It was very traumatic for him, but he chose that path.
Hindsight is 20/20, right? I guess I wouldn’t have had him apply to reachy schools across the country, but at the time he applied, he insisted he wanted to get out of the house. He’s living at home, teaches cello, plays in a professional quartet just getting off the ground, and is still struggling with self-loathing.
I think it totally depends on the disabilities and the kid. Mental health issues are incredibly challenging, and hopefully my cautionary tale can help direct your student to the right fit colleges (closer to home?).
My 2E son also attended the Achilles Program at Nassau CC (a SUNY), mentioned in post 20. I wish that I had encouraged him to take a gap year but, sadly, I fought against it and he wound up dropping out. He wasn’t really mature enough. He had lead poisoning that manifests as Aspie-lite with a gifted IQ. The program is good and I know other kids who have gone through it, but you do need to monitor them. What’s also nice is that there’s no extra fees.
He’s now in his late 20’s, working for USPS and thinking about going back to college.
My 2E child is taking gap years currently. He moved out on his own, with his own money that he saved over a long time doing odd jobs, to a nice city 1500 miles from home. He up and left one day on a bus. He is completely self-supporting except for his medical insurance and a phone. We agreed to talk in the spring about where he’s at regarding college. I feel almost zero rush about this.
Fortunately our family has as part of its culture the idea that taking a lot of time before college is a great.
His dad didn’t start college until his mid-20s and he is at the top of his field in the world, currently. It worked for him and we are hoping that, given enough time to mature and try out different jobs, seeing different places in the world, meeting lots of different people, DS will find the area of work that interests him. I mean, he kind of has already . . . .
Thank you for listing the Nassau CC program here. It’s one I hadn’t heard about and I’m happy to know it exits.
I’d like to mention also Quest University in Canada. It’s outdoorsie like Colorado, has interesting integrated classes, and because it’s in Canada, the currency exchange provides an instant discount in price.
I had two 2E kids, one flagrantly so, and they are both doing well following very different paths. Sorry if this is so long. I just wrote stream of consciousness and I hope it is helpful. I can give you specifics about what i learned about school and names of schools in a PM.
My first 2E child was severely dyslexic and with a dash of ADHD and speech delay on ths side. He was/is superb at strategic reasoning and abstract reasoning generally. He is also startling good at things like pattern recognition (he could beat a roomful of very bright folks at like Set or games of strategy. He was also very good at art. But, he puts the capital T in Tone Deaf and can’t really learn foreign languages. As he says, he’s not good at anything. He’s either great or terrible. Reading and then writing were physically painful to him. Even now, both are fatiguing for him but he worked very hard all through school and did very well on the SATs and ACTs. He later got a perfect score on the GREs including verbal.
He also was suffering from what turned out to be sleep apnea and had surgery in the year after HS. My observation was that if you want to go to an elite college, you can’t show any weaknesses in HS. So, I told him to concentrate on doing well in HS (at the school’s suggestion, he was partially homeschooled, because HS honors math was too easy for him and he really needed to learn to write and was not being taught at the HS). He didn’t take SATs/ACTs or apply to college while he was in HS but did so in his gap year, in which he also worked on a young adult novel, campaigned for Obama, helped a professor who studied dyslexia at a local university, and did a few other things as well as had a difficult surgery. He is very pleased that he did not try to apply to college until the gap year, both because he had the time to prepping for the standardized tests (he did this in 3 weeks half-time) and for the maturity he gained.
Because of his partial homeschooling program, he had to disclose is dyslexia. I would advise against doing so if you don’t have to. We didn’t know which schools would reject him because of his LDs (“he may have done well in HS but can he really cut it at Seriously Self-Impressed University?” intones the adcom member). I went to three of HYPMS and taught at one and could tell that he was a lot brighter than many of the kids at these schools. My son said, “I don’t want to fall in love with schools where I have a 10% probability of admission so I don’t want to visit schools until I’m admitted but I’ll apply to more schools and do a really good job on my apps.” He applied to 15 schools. At least half were reaches including several Ivies. All but one were within four hours drive so we could pick him up if he had continuing health problems.
I think he got into 10 or 11 and was rejected at 2 and WL at the others. Overall, we were looking for schools with minimal distribution requirements so he could avoid required courses with 400 pages of reading per week. In contrast to HS being about not showing weakness, in college (and later in grad school or at a job), it is about playing to your strengths. At my suggestion, he had applied to a few of the elite LACs and after visiting several of those and Ivies, he choose the LAC at which the DSO office said, “If we admitted your son, we’ll do everything we can to help him succeed.” They did. He triple majored in math, economics and an independt major in behavioral econ. The professors quickly figured out how bright he was and were very helpful in the accommodations — the DSO was very helpful early on — and in working with him in independent studies. He graduated with a 3.95 GPA, summa cum laude.
He also joined a couple of kids in starting a software company in his senior year despite the fact that he didn’t know how to program then. He decided to work on that after college and his partners asked him to be CEO. They raised a modest amount of money and the company got customers and is breaking even fours years later (but will never be a big success).
After 1.5 years of running it, he became frustrated that they hadn’t gotten it quite right and the company was not a software company per se but used it software tools to construct customized products for clients. This meant his job was effectively enterprise selling to big companies, universities and government agencies. He recruited a former partner at a big consulting firm to replace him as CEO (although the guy designeated himself as Active Chairman instead).
My son applied to grad school — he was admitted at age 23 to a program in data science and to business school at one of the best universities in the world for this. This was a pretty young age for the MBA. He’s been learning the math and CS behing big data and machine learning and about management. He realizes that he could be the CEO of a large company but due to his disabilites, he could never rise in one. He could have done very well at a quantitative hedge fund or in strategy/M&A at a big tech company, but instead has focused on startups. He’s finishing up school now (he has one quarter left that will be stretched across two or three quarters) and has started a new company and has raised over $3 MM to fund it —they aer oversubscribed but he will close it at $3 MM — from VCs. He’s got one or two quarters left in school but is working 14+ hours per day at the moment.
My advice: Be strategic about your D’s HS career to avoid showing weaknesses and to show strengths. Have her apply to colleges that allow her to play to her strengths rather than trying to ameliorate her weaknesses. My son has gotten much better at reading, writing, and organizing but was able to do this on his own terms. Don’t disclose LDs prior to admission if you can avoid doing so. Negotiate with the DSOs of schools AFTER your child has been admitted. He chose against an Ivy because of the lukewarm and unhelpful response of the head of the DSO there. I mentioned it to a former client who was a big supporter (and it turns out trustee) who raised the issue at the board level. They were very unhappy losing a strong student because of the DSO. Get tutoring if needed early. Use the DSO for organizational help if your child needs it. My son was never ashamed to tell people he was dyslexic or to take advantage of accommodations. His objective was to succeed. Get siupport from the people around you. My son helped many people with the conceptual part of their work and they often helped him (read me this chapter). His current GF recognizes that he is an unusually bright and ambitious guy but isn’t organized in life (outside of his two or three priorities) and she has taken over a lot of that. Life post HS is more about playing to your strengths.
My D was also quite bright (objectively 10 points lower in Verbal IQ than my son, which still makes her quite bright). But, she was much more interested in concrete knowledge and not so interested in abstract thinking if she couldn’t see a direct application. So, unlike her brother, she didn’t seem like an academic whiz. Unlike her brother who was ultra-competitive, she hated competition (maybe due to following him). Nonetheless, she got into a couple of private schools that didn’t admit him. She was diagnesed with ADHD, but I really think this came from anxiety. The anxiety may or may not have come from a serious medical condition that we didn’t learn about until she was 9 and didn’t solve until she was 12.
Given her lack of interest in academic subjects if they weren’t useful, the only two subjects she liked in HS were human biology and statistics. She wasn’t that good at math so she decided to study biology.
Given her competition avoidance and her dual US/Canadian citizenship, she decided to apply to college in Canada where she would know in advance where she would get in. I took her on a tour of seven or eight schools, she chose two and applied only to them and got in to both. In Canada, generally, you choose an area in which you study (science versus humanities versus …) and can’t easily switch between majors outsdie of those areas. So, she applied in Faculty of Science and went to one of the schools. Generally, she was thinking about medicine but was concerned about the difficulties we’d seen among our female friends who were both doctors and mothers (my D is very clear she wants to have/raise kids). At orientation, she met a girl in line who was studying nursing. She called me and said, “How would you feel if I switched from biology to nursing?” Because it was more concrete and more people-focused — she is a very social, tall pretty young woman with advanced social skills she learned from her mother. The school said she would need to reapply as a freshman (1st year student as they say in Canada).
Long story short(er). She transferredl after the first semester to a a college in our area that offered ani accelerated BSN/MSN program to become a Nurse Practitioner in 5 years. The level of academic competition was lower here than in her private HS or her Canadian college.She excelled at this as it ties exactly to her type of intelligence — connecting concrete knowledge to useful action using scientific knowledge. She graduated with a 3.95 GPA, summa cum laude and the equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her MSN, went to SE Asia for three months (gift from me) and then started working asl an NP at age 23. She loves her job and they love her — she has grown a panel of 500 patients in 8 months. Unfotunately for them and her, she is going to quit it aftetr a year to live in the same city as her BF.
Advice: Again play to your kids’ strengths and cognitive styles. Given the field she was choosing, there was not cost to going to a less prestigious place. Being in a school where lshe was among the strongest academically was really good for her confidence. Prestige is only worthwhile if you are in a field where that prestige is useful. She didn’t want to take a gap year but would have benefitted from one.
I recommend you look at the graduation requirements for colleges before allowing him to apply. Any college that requires foreign language as a graduation requirement should probably be eliminate because of his auditory processing issues.
You also might look into auditory integration therapy – which was originated in France. Our son did this therapy 20 years ago with an audiologist,when he was in middle school and it eliminated his auditory processing disorder within a year. I would not have believed it was possible but you can sure call me a believer now.
Unfortunately the AIT sites often tout this form of therapy as an “effective treatment” for many other different learning differences , but for auditory processing disorder it really does work.
I have a 2E kid (PG and Asperger’s/ADD.) She had some terrible experiences in regular school as a child, which held her back for a while. She homeschooled from the age of 11, but I struggled to get her to focus on formal schoolwork. She learned all sorts of things – taught herself Japanese, read everything Shakespeare and Chaucer ever wrote, etc. – but I could not get her to follow a curriculum that would have provided her with a high school diploma. She started community college at 17 and took several classes, mostly focusing on studio art, for about four years, which helped her to transition into a college setting. She did not want to leave home, so she initially sort of sabotaged my efforts to help her transfer into a four-year. I had hoped she’d be interested in Colorado College (a school others here have explored,) but she ultimately decided to study music, so a couple of years ago she transferred into a local public university with an excellent music program. She may do a double degree (biology as well as music) while she’s there. The social situation at college has sometimes been painful for her, but she’s transitioned well to living in on campus and has excelled academically (straight A’s) and musically. Each semester is easier for her than the last. We were told she had the IQ to start college at 12, but she’s actually a little delayed. I don’t think she had the social or organizational skills to handle a formal academic environment until recently. Anyhow, she’s happy and thriving:-)
menloparkmom writes, “Any college that requires foreign language as a graduation requirement should probably be eliminate because of his auditory processing issues.”
A possible option might be to do ASL as a foreign language? Many colleges and schools will accept ASL for their foreign language requirement.
Sometimes the foreign language can be pass/fail and the student can get by.