The Makor College experience: Successes and challenges in the first years of a college experience program for individuals with intellectual disability

Abstract

Recent decades have shown a tremendous increase in post- secondary education programs for college aged students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. The Makor College Experience, a three-year, non-degree program on the campus of a private university, is one such program. This paper shares some insights that were discovered as the developers of this program attempted to overcome the challenges of including students with ID on a college campus, addressing issues such as the dialectic between being “rights-based” and “person centered,” as well as coping with the “misguided kindness” of staff and fellow students who, with the purest of intensions, tolerate inappropriate behavior of participants in the program in a manner that, in the long run, may actually hinder their growth and acceptance in the outside world.