“It's Absolutely About Just Surviving”: How Autistic College Students Define Success

Abstract

Traditional conversations around college student success are often externally imposed on students, as opposed to honoring what matters to them, and autistic students are no exception, with limited scholarship on their experiences around success. This study, the largest of its kind with 425 undergraduate autistic college students, many of whom share additional marginalized identities, draws from a national sample where we uncovered what success means to them. In so doing we illuminate five key domains in their lives that also influenced our research design: Identity, Psychology, Academics, Community, and Employment (IPACE). In this paper, we feature students’ responses to an open-ended survey question about how they define success. Students commonly illustrated graduating and receiving high grades as definitive of their success; Academics was the most popular domain. Meanwhile, Community excerpts illustrated the vitality of building friendships. Employment, Psychology, and Identity also manifested, albeit not as frequently, though codes show the importance of holding a job, maintaining good mental and emotional health, and demonstrating self-initiative, respectively. Our study calls for practitioners to more intentionally respect autistic students’ multifaceted priorities, as well as prompts researchers to build on IPACE for their own inquiries.