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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As someone with lots of experience teaching intellectually capable students who have failed only because their work and family responsibilities as first-generation, low income undergraduates left them without the time and space to concentrate on their studies, I would argue that until we can support these students in making the most of their abilities, public funding shouldn't be available to intellectually incapable students (e.g. people with Down Syndrome) who because they come from middle-class homes consider it their right to attend "college" (i.e. outrageously expensive programs like this one at Vandy: https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/departments/nextsteps/)[/quote]

Not sure why you specified Down Syndrome. Many of the kids in these programs have high functioning autism, often socially awkward but with higher raw intelligence than many of heavily packaged kids. It’s telling that some of them sail into FAANG dev gigs that when so many parents of “normal” kids spend years unsuccessfully grooming their kids for those positions. [/quote]

"Students and parents often visit ThinkCollege.net looking for information about supports for students with autism. While many of the programs listed in the Think College Search do support students with both intellectual disability and autism, for students who want to pursue a degree and plan to apply to college through a typical admissions process, the programs in the Think College listing are not the best fit" (https://thinkcollege.net/faq).

"Trisomy 21 (T21) or Down syndrome (DS) is a chromosomal disorder resulting from the triplication of all or part of a chromosome 21. It is a common birth defect, the most frequent and recognizable form of intellectual disabilities (ID), appearing in about one out of every 700 newborns. The average intelligence quotient (IQ) of children with DS is around 50, ranging between 30 and 70. Remarkably, a small number of patients have a profound degree of ID, whereas others have a mild degree despite the absence of any genetic, cultural or familial favoring or disfavoring causes" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3798834/)[/quote]

The Down Syndrome kids who would be interested in going to college would be on the very high end of the IQ range. Community colleges and lower end state schools are full of lower IQ kids. [/quote]

Nope, not even close. The thousands of students I taught within an inner city public university system may not have been able to hack it at Swarthmore as an aggregate group, but with only a few exceptions they all had the intellectual ability to put together argumentative essays and research papers evaluating the validity of certain theories/complex ideas, and whatever issues they had in their writing that undermined the strengths of their arguments were within the realm of what I'd expect to find in papers written by undergraduates at any college, including the very competitive one at which I currently teach. Many of my students were majoring in some sort of engineering, so literary analysis may not have been suited to their strongest skill sets, but they definitely didn't have low IQs. [/quote]

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