After getting this question from a parent this week, we thought that other families might be wondering the same thing. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, but we wanted to offer some considerations for students and parents who may also be wondering about how much to disclose.
As a general rule, we recommend against disclosing your student’s learning profile during the application process. The reason for this is that admissions officers do not typically have the training or experience to read this type of document.
This is important - without an understanding of the way these evaluations typically read, or how learning differences present themselves, the admissions officer may conclude that the student isn’t able to handle the transition to college - even when this isn’t the case at all! Parents whose children have evaluations will know that these are written in a specific way to try to make the student eligible for accommodations - they emphasize the “differences” and to an untrained eye, they can sound extreme.
Especially for selective schools with large applicant pools, they are essentially looking for reasons to say “no” - and there are many unconscious biases. While no admissions officer would intentionally discriminate against a student with a disability, there is no point in providing information that could be perceived in a negative way.
And one note here - admissions officers CANNOT ask you to disclose your student’s learning profile! This is against the law and you do not need to disclose unless you want to do so.
That said, there are some cases where you may have a reason to disclose something specific about your student’s learning differences. We recommend doing this in an essay, additional statement, or counselor recommendation letter, rather than sending a learning profile, testing report, or other more involved document.
For instance, if your student had undiagnosed dyslexia that caused his grades to plummet during ninth and tenth grade, but received a diagnosis and saw rapid improvement in eleventh grade, that would be a reason to disclose the diagnosis.
In short, it is helpful to disclose only if the disclosure will help to explain something in the student’s transcript (like a drop in grades) or an issue elsewhere in the application.
You may also want to discuss with your student’s school counselor whether they feel that there is something specific they need to disclose in their counselor letter in order to give context for the student’s performance in high school. This is an area where it’s very important to trust the counselor’s judgment. If they believe that they need to make a disclosure in order to say something positive, there’s probably a good reason for that.
If you do decide to offer an additional statement that touches on learning differences, it is important to include the strategies that your student has used to improve or maintain classroom performance. The disclosure will be so much more compelling if your student can point to ways in which they’ve worked hard and improved. This will also increase the confidence of that admissions officer, who may not have a full understanding of the student’s abilities. Overcoming a challenge can be a really positive thing to mention in an application!
Once your student is admitted, however, you should absolutely talk with the college’s learning center about what kind of support they can expect. Every college has a learning center (Shannon came to us from the one at Boston College!) and they will all provide similar services. The most popular ones are usually notetaking assistance, extra time on tests, and distraction-reduced testing environments. Generally, learning centers are much more likely to take the time to meet with admitted students than prospective ones, so you should absolutely reach out as you try to make your final college decision!
And if your student is currently struggling with a learning difficulty, including ADHD, academic anxiety, and executive functioning challenges, we can also provide some extra assistance through academic coaching! If you are interested in learning more about academic coaching, you can book a Meet & Greet here.