Negotiating Disclosure: Students’ Meaning-Making Around Disability Categories in Higher Education

• In Event: Disability in Society Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3. Social Participation and Connections

Abstract

Over the past three decades, enrollment of students with disabilities in U.S. higher education has risen substantially, yet completion rates remain disproportionately low. While academic accommodations improve persistence and outcomes, fewer than half of eligible students disclose their disability status to access them. This paradox forms the central puzzle of this project: why do so few students eligible for disability services actually receive them?

Existing research has explained non-disclosure primarily through individual-level factors, including stigma, self-perception, and institutional barriers. This project reframes disclosure not as a private act, but as a socially negotiated process, shaped by organizational structures, institutional norms, micro-level interactions, and students' intersecting social identities. I focus on students with invisible disabilities- conditions not immediately apparent to others but affecting daily functioning, such as psychological conditions, chronic illness, and learning differences. These students must actively decide whether, when, and how to reveal personal and potentially stigmatizing information, weighing perceived benefits against perceived risks.

To capture these dynamics, I employ a longitudinal qualitative design, following a cohort of 50 undergraduates with invisible disabilities at a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) over one academic year. The sample is intentionally structured across three groups: (1) students who successfully obtained accommodations; (2) students who applied but were denied or chose not to use them; and (3) students who were eligible but never applied. Data includes a total of 150 semi-structured interviews with students, as well as interviews with Disability Services Center staff to contextualize student experiences within institutional processes. By tracing how disability categories are interpreted, activated, and resisted across divergent student trajectories, this study advances sociological understandings of how institutions simultaneously enable and constrain access, with implications for scholarship on administrative burden, organizational gatekeeping, and inequality in higher education.

Author

• Mackenzie Bonner, University of California-Irvine