A recent study shows that one out of every three young adults who have autism lack employment, and have no college or technical education. Improvements need to be made in the systems that support young adults that have autism, in order to address this issue.
Ideally, parents want their children to grow up to be self-sufficient members of society. A recent study found that, in some ways, this isn’t what is happening with many young adults who have autism. Researchers found that one in three young adults who have an autism spectrum disorder is unemployed, and that they had no paid job experiences. The same number did not have college or technical school experience, even seven years after high school.
The researchers looked at data that came from the United States Department of Education. It included data on kids who were receiving special education services. There were around 2,000 young adults with one of four types of disabilities involved. 500 of them had autism. The data was from 2007 to 2008, before the Recession happened and unemployment increased dramatically.
The results of this study indicate that policymakers really need to do something very quickly. It has been said that there is a large number of young children who have been diagnosed with autism right now. Things need to change before these kids become adults. At this time, there are a lot of teens who rely on the mental health services that they can get at high school. Once they graduate, they suddenly find themselves without support.
In my opinion, one of the first things that can be done is to restore the funding for special needs education in colleges and universities. Recently, there have been many colleges that decided to fix their budget problems by cutting back on, or completely terminating, their special needs programs. Some colleges said that they could no longer afford to run these programs because a federal grant that helped to fund them had ended. Policymakers need to work on restoring that funding.
In 2014, the Affordable Care Act will require health insurance plans to cover treatment for mental illness. It already requires insurers to allow parents to include their offspring who is between the ages of 18 and 26 under the parent’s health insurance plan. This legislation could help young adults who have autism, and other mental health issues, to get some help.
It would also help if high school special education programs had a system in place that would help teens who have autism to gain some work experience. Sometimes, this type of help falls into a “Life Skills” class. This would allow teens to gain some paid job experience while they are in high school, (just like their peers). It also gives the young adult with autism something to put on a job application or resume under the section that asks about work experience.
Image by Kathryn Decker-Krauth on Flickr