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Like many of my cohorts, I was sold the line that higher education was the golden ticket to a successful life. Off I set at eighteen to Eastern Michigan University, sure of what I wanted and what I would do. But life being as it is, and plans going the way they often do, I didn’t graduate. I dropped out to have a baby, joined the Navy, was medically discharged, and left drifting without tangible purpose. This is at least in part due to my husband’s active duty status, taking us overseas. This is not unusual, as the same manifesto notes that as of 2017, 60 percent of non-traditional students are women. At least I had my Post-9/11 G.I. Bill, a college payment incentive offered for military enlistment after the 9/11 attacks, and since my life became more stable in my late 20s and early 30s, the time seemed right: I enrolled at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

As a disabled veteran and mother of a teenager, I knew some of the challenges awaiting me after admission. Being significantly older than my peers and being mistaken for a graduate student or instructor were odd blows to my self-esteem. There were numerous others I’d not considered. But as I sit here three weeks from graduating at the time of this writing, I’ve realized that I’ve succeeded despite higher education institutions failing to understand the needs of non-traditional students.

The university experience in the United States is designed to pipeline high school graduates through it and into the workplace as fast as possible, even with the reality that financial success is not necessarily waiting at the other end. Our campus is full of eye-catching signs encouraging undergraduate students to finish in four years, encouraging a fifteen-credit course load if you mean to finish within four years, instead of a full-time load of just twelve. Each syllabus reminds us that we should expect three hours of outside class work per week per credit hour. A fifteen-credit schedule alone starts with fifteen hours a week under instruction. If each class sticks to only that three hours per week outside of class, you’ve racked up forty-five hours of homework. Being a full-time student is more than full time. If your only responsibility is class, and you budget your time well, that may just be doable.

As a theatre major, like many other majors, it’s also not unheard of to have to fit in many outside-of-class activities. I study stage management and playwriting, and that requires me to run shows. I am lucky to have instructors who help me find alternate routes to these requirements, but not every department is this accommodating.

Class and homework are not always the only things people are balancing.

In addition to family duties and disability status, I’m an author, which is a demanding job that comes with irregular hours, most of them unpaid. My time is valuable. My work and financial circumstance allow me to put projects on pause, to the frustration of my ambition. But I still find it difficult to keep up with the amount of self-promotion being an author requires. I was asked to choose between my GPA and my income.

My share of the responsibilities of my home life doesn’t stop for my school day, not if we want things like packed lunches and clean underwear. Even with on-campus services like the Student Parents at Mānoa (SPAM), who help to fill in gaps in childcare, there are limitations. Families need fed. Meals need planned. Perpetual chores pile up each and every day, even if you did them the day before. My family is great about sharing chores, but they have school and jobs too. Of course, traditional students often have to deal with this, as a record number of young people currently live in a household with at least one other generation, which only further emphasizes the need for more support.

And commutes! My commute of twenty miles one way is over an hour. By the time I get home, with a mountain of homework or paperwork, those languishing piles of laundry and cat boxes in need of scooping make me want to cry. Plus, between commuting, family care, instruction time, homework, paid and unpaid non-school work, sleep must happen.

As a person living with chronic pain and mental illness, I often find the demands on my time challenging. My mobility is largely unaffected, which is good, since several of the buildings I frequent lack elevators for my second and third floor classes. With chronic pain often comes chronic fatigue, and while I can make it up and down all of those stairs, it takes its toll.

Managing disability and mental health requires appointments. Appointments take time out of home, work, rest, and class since they tend to be during standard business hours. Going to school for me means staying on my medications. Keeping that medication requires monthly appointments. Many classes penalize overall grades — some as much as one-third of a letter grade deduction — for missed instruction time. If you maintain attendance and miss appointments, health issues inevitably arise, requiring more missed class hours. My teenage child also has appointments, which my spouse and I must take turns with so neither of us miss too much work or school.

Most campuses now have disability services, like UH Mānoa’s Kōkua office. For many students, knowing what accommodations to ask for is daunting. What help can they offer for missed meds and bad traffic? Even if you know what to ask for, it needs to be documented by a qualifying medical professional, which is more outside-of-class time, and the hours per week are reaching untenable.

Universities could take great steps, including encouraging communication with instructors or eliminating graded attendance, in order to address some of these issues. Integrate more one-stop offices to help non-traditional students navigate enrollment and registration. Place non-traditional students on your student governments, boards of regents, and other organizations empowered to enact policy change. Create liaison positions for non-traditional students to direct their needs. Even small things, like eliminating assignments that are little more than busywork, can be an amazing reprieve.

Like I said, I’m in the final days. I would have to try to fail at this point, and even then it may not be enough to undo what I’ve accomplished. At the end of the term, many non-traditional and later-in-life students will graduate, but our successes are in spite of these circumstances. So, I guess that toilet is going to need to wait a few more weeks.

Like nearly 20 percent of American college students, Landre is disabled. And because Landre has spinal muscular atrophy type 2 and uses a wheelchair, her success is possible in part due to Medicaid-funded personal care assistance. The hours of personal care she receives at home allow Landre to live and study independently, while attendants help her complete crucial daily tasks related to hygiene, eating, and safety. But just a few weeks ago, her insurance company’s decision to cut her care hours from 112 hours per week to 70 nearly brought her college career to an end.

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Her insurer’s decision to reduce her access to in-home aide care is just one symptom of an underlying problem related to recent slashes to Medicaid funding. “New Jersey, like a lot of states, has tried to cut costs in their Medicaid program by contracting insurance companies called managed care organizations [MCOs], to manage it. It’s a weird way of privatizing Medicaid,” Landre explained. Some states contract with MCOs, made up of groups of health care providers, clinics, and organizations, to provide Medicaid services for a set amount per member each month.

This setup means MCOs are free in some cases to make cost-cutting decisions for profit, rather than basing decisions on actual assessments of medical needs and quality of life. Cuts affect marginalized populations like seniors and disabled people who need long-term care disproportionately, and often result in outdated policies that harm disabled people most. Almost 3 million seniors and disabled individuals rely on Medicaid for in-home personal care services that allow them to avoid institutionalization in a nursing home or other facility. “The incentives here are for them to keep cutting people’s care down, and there are very few consequences for that,” said Landre.

In the wake of a flurry of media attention, the New Jersey Department of Human Services reversed its decision, reaching a new agreement with Landre to reinstate her former care plan. But Landre and other disabled college students say it shouldn’t take public pressure on the part of individual advocates to address a much bigger underlying problem. “While this agreement will fix my situation, it does nothing to help thousands of other disabled New Jerseyans who continue to suffer due to discriminatory Medicaid policies and the predatory behavior of their insurance companies,” she wrote on Twitter.

Other students in Landre’s position have had to mount similar nationwide campaigns. From launching crowdfunding efforts and navigating complex bureaucratic systems for months at a time to spending hours publicizing their messages on social media, in press conferences, and on media outlets, disabled students often bear the burden of serving as both tireless advocates and public relations specialists just to attend college.

17-year-old Darcy Trinco, for example, who also has spinal muscular atrophy type 2, has faced many of the same obstacles in her path to a pre-med curriculum at Johns Hopkins University in the fall. Her current allotment of 30 hours of personal care services per week won’t be enough when she’s living independently. She and her family have been wading through a sea of red tape and uncertainty since she was first admitted.

Today’s stories of the roadblocks that often await disabled college students as they try to access educational opportunities are eerily similar to those faced by activist Nick Dupree (who sadly died in 2017) back in 2003. A quadriplegic and writing student at Spring Hill College, Dupree used in-home nursing care services through Medicaid while attending school in order to live independently. Threatened with losing those services upon turning 21, Dupree launched a campaign called “Nick’s Crusade” to fight for his right to remain in college and to avoid having to enter a nursing home facility after his 21st birthday.

Recently trending hashtags like #WhyDisabledPeopleDropOut are a sobering reminder that the obstacles facing disabled college students are systemic rather than isolated — and that not much has changed in the 16 years since Nick’s Crusade. “It’s so hard for disabled people to fight [this kind of segregation] in most cases,” Landre said, noting that, with family support and knowledge of the law, she’s actually “one of the lucky ones.” Many disabled students don’t have access to the same legal knowledge, family supports, and widespread publicity as the ones who most often make the news. Many disabled students don’t know that they even have the right to “fight the system,” much less the resources to do so.

Many disabled college students who drop out — which happens at around twice the rate of nondisabled students — cite trouble accessing accommodations and adequate personal care hours as significant factors in their decision to leave school. That’s why changes to state Medicaid policies through means like New Jersey’s proposed bill A4130, which would increase reimbursable personal care hours for working adults with disabilities, and broader civil rights legislation like the proposed Disability Integration Act could be so instrumental, Landre says, in leveling the playing ground for all students.

Landre knew the problem was deeper than her individual access to education, even after state officials reached out to her to sign a new agreement that would allow her to return to school. She isn’t about to stop fighting for her right, and the right of other disabled college students, to integrated education.

“So many other people just get a letter in the mail with an agency decision and don’t even know they can appeal. They have to go, ‘Well, now I have to get divorced, or move back in with my parents, or quit my job.’” She concluded, “It’s long past time for things to change” — both in terms of Medicaid’s outdated policies and in terms of ideologies that keep disabled people isolated, institutionalized, and excluded.

It turns out that for most UC-Riverside students, financial aid for the upcoming school year had been released a few days before. When I checked my bank account the next day, I had not received my reimbursement from my financial aid package.

As a senior who depends on financial aid, I’ve filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA — the form required by the federal government in order to receive grants and loans for college — three times previously and never had a problem. But after digging through old emails, I found one I’d missed from my school’s financial aid office earlier in the summer stating “Financial Aid App Incomplete.” After logging into my school’s student web portal, I finally found the reason my aid was being withheld: I had been selected for verification.

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Verification, or the auditing of student financial aid applications for additional review, is routine — even when the original information is correct. The Department of Education selects roughly 30 percent of financial aid recipients’ applications to verify, but the information they choose to review varies. I was audited for my dependency status, so over the course of the past couple of months, I have submitted my mother’s original tax returns to my financial aid office, resubmitted them with specific IRS documents after they were rejected, and then waited for weeks while they were reviewed by my school’s financial aid office. All told, the documents and late fees cost about $150

Unfortunately, my situation is far from unique. The 2018-2019 application cycle saw an unusually high number of verifications due to an algorithm adjustment from the Department of Education. The algorithm change, combined with the repeal of the 30 percent cap on audits — removed in anticipation of the new algorithm — has caused the number of verifications to skyrocket. At my own university, where more than half of students receive Pell Grants, a financial aid counselor reported that 8,000 students were selected for verification — more than double the 3,000 who went through the verification process last year.

Data show that 98 percent of students picked for verification are low-income, and that about half of students that are eligible for a federal Pell Grant are selected. About 95 percent of students that successfully make it through verification have no change in their aid, but many students do not make it through the process.  According to the National College Access Network, in the 2015-16 academic year — before the verification numbers spiked — 90,000 low-income students were not able to complete the verification process and receive aid.

Even students who make it through the process face delays that could be critical for those who are struggling to afford their rent, groceries, and school expenses. For me, going back to school involved taking a giant leap of faith. By the time I arrived in D.C. for the fall semester I was still without any financial aid. I spent my second day in D.C. calling my financial aid office, student business services, and the center where I would be staying. I was terrified that if my aid didn’t come through, I would be forced to drop the program.

After two hours of fighting my way through busy signals, I finally managed to find myself in queue. I was on hold for several more hours until someone told me that they had received my paperwork, but had not yet flagged it to be seen by an administrator.

This process took a total of nearly 10 weeks to complete. If it weren’t for working both during summer and the quarter, family support, and guidance from financial aid counselors at my school, I  would not have been able to make it to this point. As a first-generation college student whose family never left the town were they grew up, the 11 or so weeks I would spend more than 2,000 miles away from home might as well be 11 years.

But I am one of the lucky ones. For more than 90,000 other students like me, this all ended very different.