Bridging the Gap Between Disability Support Services and Career Services on College Campuses. Presenter: Alan Muir. >> AARON: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the webcast on Bridging the Gap Between Disability Support Services and Career Services on College Campuses. My name is Aaron McCullough, and I'm a legal specialist with the Disability Law Resource Project at ILRU, and we're your sponsor for today's event. I'll be moderating today's webcast and voicing your questions later to the presenter. But before we get started, I want to address some technical concerns and a little housekeeping. I want to remind you about sending questions, and we encourage you to do so. We want you to send those. In order to submit a question, you can click on the submit question button at the bottom of your RealOne Player or your Media Player or simply address it in an E-mail to webcast@ilru.org. That's webcast@ilru.org. So you can submit them directly through the RealOne interface or E-mail them. Send them now or at any time during the presentation. I will then take those questions and voice those to our presenter when he allows us to pause for questions. If for some reason time does not allow the presenter to answer all those questions, they will be posted on the message board after the webcast on our website. We will address your questions directly. Additionally, if anyone has technical difficulties today, and we hope you do not, please call us at (713)520-0232. That's (713)520-0232. And if you dial that number, dial 0 to get the operator. That number is both voice and TTY capable. But as previously mentioned today, our title topic is Bridging the Gap Between Disability Support Services and Career Services on College Campuses. I think that kind of explains it all. And to introduce the person who is going to present, I will need to let you folks know that I am overjoyed to have Mr. Alan Muir here. I have been a big fan of the program that he's going to be discussing throughout the content of this presentation coming up. Mr. Muir, for those of you in Texas, works at the other U.T, the University of Tennessee. He is a co-founder of the Career Opportunities for Students with Disabilities and now is its Executive Director. He comes to us from the private sector. He was previously a vice-president with Chase Manhattan Bank on Long Island in New York. Mr. Muir's other involvements with the disability community are really too numerous to number, but I want to assure you that he is actively involved in the state and national level on disability issues and he's a recent recipient of the much coveted and competitive Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities which is a very highly competitive national honor, and I think actually one I knew about slightly before he won it. I want you to join me in listening to him present today and I want to thank him for coming. Mr. Muir... >> ALAN: Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate that and thank you for the intro and it is always helpful. I wanted to also thank Aaron for inviting me to be here to do the webcast, and this is my first time doing a webcast, so it's going to be a little bit of a learning experience for me as we go along, but hopefully the content of the presentation will be something that will be helpful to all of you and I'm sure that we'll have some time at the end of the presentation to answer some questions. So I'm looking forward to that. Since we're a little bit pressed for time as well, I'll get right into the presentation so we can go to the next slide and take a look at what we have there. Basically, what we were looking at when we -- when I joined the University of Tennessee, when I was hired by them, I had met up with Dr. Robert Greenberg who was the director of career services at that time. He's now retired, but still active with the university. And he had told me about a project that he wanted to do for several years, and that was to figure out a way to increase the number of students with disabilities to come into his office, into the career services office. And he basically had observed that from noticing the lack of -- or the small number of folks with obvious disabilities coming in to use his office. And he asked me when -- even before I was hired to come on here -- he asked me would you like to be the person to spearhead this project? And it didn't take me long to say yes, of course I would. And of course I didn't know exactly what I was getting into at that point, but it's been a wonderful ride so far to be able to be a part of this new initiative. The one thing that we figured out that we needed to do was to identify methods of helping that increase of traffic of these students to come in and use career services. Next slide, please. And to continue with the background and since really as Aaron had mentioned, I came from the private sector and was very new to academia at that point. I really needed to get myself immersed into some research about the particular issue that had always been a part of me, but I needed to learn more broadly exactly how this issue was being viewed. And in the research that we did through articles and other references that I was able to find, there was extensive research on the transition from high school to work or from vocational programs to work, but really very, very little, if really almost nothing, transition to work from higher education. The only places we saw that was from University of Minnesota, so if any of you guys are on the line from Minnesota, give yourselves a big pat on the back from 1998 when we were looking at this. Now there has been a lot more studies done and some more activity in this area, and I'm hoping part of it is because of the efforts we have made in COSD and in bringing this issue out. And also we found that there was really no statistics on the unemployment rate of college graduates with disabilities. After looking at a number of different statistical bases that we could come up with, we kind of extrapolated a -- an estimate, and the best estimate that we could come up with for the unemployment rate for people -- for college graduates with disabilities was nearly 40 percent. And that's astronomical, really, when you're thinking about it. The unemployment rate generally for college students without disabilities is somewhere in the 1 to 3 percent range. 3 percent if it's really a bad market, a bad employment market like we've just come out of; or now going back toward the 1 percent because of improvement in the labor market, particularly for fresh hires straight out of college. So we looked at this and we said, okay, we have to figure out a way to do this, and we need to go and talk to some experts and really focus on exactly what is out there. Next slide, please. And we went to our Tennessee State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation and we gave them this nebulous idea of what we wanted to do and they were very forward-thinking with us to grant us a small amount of funding that would be mainly for travel expenses for both Dr. Greenberg and myself. So all they required was to have a full report of results of the research and then also some type of a plan for relieving the problems that we found that could be brought back to the University of Tennessee. Once again, we were focused only on U.T. at this point. Next slide, please. And we went into the active research with a hypothesis that basically was that collaboration between disability services and career services really is needed. We found that here at U.T. that there really hadn't been sufficient interaction between the two offices, and that seemed to be one of the causes of the very low involvement of students with disabilities in career services. And that kind of -- by the fact that we clearly understood that career services is really the only campus office at which employers come to visit and recruit for students in general, and they are looking for students with disabilities and students with disabilities are not participating in career services, they are then virtually invisible to employers. And another thing that we came out with on this, too, was that not only are they invisible to employers, but then they don't receive the type of preparation that is really necessary to be competitive with students without disabilities. So those were very clear pieces of the hypothesis that we needed to work with as we started the research. We also understood that career services from our own experience here at U.T. needed to have more exposure to disability to be more welcoming and to be more helpful to students with disabilities. And on the flipside, disability services really needed to have at least some smattering of exposure to careers and what the career services office does and to be able to impart some very basic ideas to the students that they interact with and you guys interact with all the time. And we'll be talking about that throughout the presentation. Next slide, please. Just to give you an idea of what we did with the university research and I'll just kind of go through there very quickly, but we met with more than 25 universities in person across the country from the University of Washington and Cal Berkeley on the west coast and San Jose State University on the west coast all the way to northeastern and N. Y. U. and Georgia Tech and some Florida schools in the east. And we found these schools because of certain materials that we were looking at, which was a new mobility magazine, if you can believe it, had the top 50 schools that were great for young people with disabilities to go to and this was an issue in the summer of 1998. And we used that as a great tool to go to all of the great universities that work with students with disabilities so effectively. Also, about part of the way through the process, we met up with Paul Meyer, who at that time has now since retired -- everybody is retiring all of a sudden -- but he had been working with the Department of Labor, their Office of Disability Employment Policy for many, many, many years and was the guy running the workforce recruitment program. So he had a significant amount of experience in finding schools that were extremely sensitive to the issue of careers and students with disabilities. So we used those two resources to identify who we were going to talk to. And what we were looking to do is to identify a model program that integrated students with disabilities into career services. And that was -- that was our primary goal was to identify that. Next slide, please. The results of the university research was that -- was that we had found no active model program out there there really wasn't anything that we could use as a whole to bring back to U.T, and most of that was because of several great programs were out there, but due to the -- due to the things that we all know and hold dear, is the funding would go away or the person who was the spearhead of that particular project moved on to another project somewhere else. But we did find vestiges and little pieces of things that were adopted by the university and we were able to pull that back with us. We also found other possible programs that were active, but basically not as effective as we really wanted to -- to have. A couple of examples are on this slide, including a signing a specific person in career services as the disability expert. And that was rejected I'm sure most of you figured out why that would be, but it really basically de facto discloses a disability for a person that is coming in and asking the receptionist for that particular person. If anybody knows that person is the disability expert, they've disclosed they have a disability. That is something that we wanted to avoid and anything that we did here at U.T. >> AARON: Alan, this is Aaron. I'm sorry to interject and interrupt. We have been receiving a number of calls. We are having technical difficulties with the slide presentation projecting and we are trying to work on that on our end. I just wanted to individuals those callers that we will make the content of the presentation available to them afterwards if they are unable to view it and we are aware of the situation and apologize. We'll try to work out these technical glitches, but as they come, but this is kind of our first blush at trying to do this and still make it accessible. So I apologize for interrupting. I'll let you get back. >> ALAN: No problem. Thank you. And also we found with the university research that there was some universities that really had little awareness -- some offices, either disability services or career services, were really very -- almost unaware of the existence of the other. So that is something that we knew was a serious problem and we needed to make sure that that collaboration was going to work here at Tennessee. Next slide, the employer research also was done concurrently with the university research and we met with a number of national employers, more than 35 of them, and we were seeking success stories of recruitment of college graduates with disabilities looking at trying to identify employers that were really ready to recruit college students with disabilities. And we'll talk about the results of that part of the research also on the next slide. The results of that research were a little surprising in that we had more questions than answers. From the employers, they were asking, well, where do we find the students with disabilities? And that kind of verified our hypothesis that if students were not using career services, they were not involved in that, then they were invisible to employers. And then the other part of this was they asked when we do find the students, why are they unqualified? And that is basically kind of the same answer because if the students are not receiving -- not a part of career services, not involved in things there, then they are not receiving the type of preparation that would make them competitive, and some of that stuff is really involving work experience and that is something that employers are asking for or requiring to some point before a person is actually even considered in the -- to be interviewed. And that's something we're working very hard on to improve that number of students who have some type of work experience that would be related to the type of industry that they're looking to get into. What we did find was a great amount of enthusiasm, a great recognition of the need to hire people with disabilities. These employers really understood the idea of the changing workforce. They also knew, very much so, knew about the looming labor shortage that is still coming and they see disability -- people with disabilities and new hires with disabilities as being a great source of new candidates and new employees. So that's one thing -- right to a company all did way down the line, we saw that as being the response. So that was very encouraging to see that. Next slide, please. So out of all of this research and trying to find things that were out there and bringing back things that were pieces of a successful programs, we decided to develop an office, one that was separate of disability services and career services, but it's important to note that it actually is a liaison office. So this disability careers office was something that began in late 1999 with some funding from our state V. R. It was about $70,000 and that was overhead that U.T. required and it was just basically that was for the start-up and we received funding for the next four years -- or a little bit less than that amount, but for the entire four years and then we'll talk about what happened after that. But I need to be clear in saying that this office does not replicate career services and certainly does not replace it. What we're looking for is to have this Disability Careers Office being the intermediate stop for students who are referred from disability services or from V. R. to help them with a lot of different specific issues that are personal to them relating to their disability. And always looking for the ultimate referral to career services. And just to kind of give you a little bit of housekeeping on this, too, the coordinator at that time was supervised by career services by Dr. Greenberg since he was the person who had co-founded this and was instrumental in putting it together. And some of the issues that we -- that the coordinator does work with students about are increasing their skill, improving their skill in self-advocacy and also talking about strategies of disclosure, and disclosure as we all know is a huge issue for -- particularly for students with hidden types of disabilities. So we really work with those students very, very carefully to help them understand that they have the decision in their hands, that we provide them with all of the materials that they -- and tools that they need to make that decision on their own. We spent a lot of time on that decision model as to whether disclosure in an employment situation is actually necessary and if it is deemed to be necessary, how to do it, when to do it, what to say; and we script it out with them very carefully, but we don't individuals them to or not to disclose. We just give them the opportunity to make that decision on their own and work with them, whatever the decision may be. Next slide, please. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of the results over six years of the existence of the disability careers office, we did have a peak. We had a nice growth there for the first couple of years, peaked in '03 when things were really moving along very, very nicely. We had 150 students who were served by basically a coordinator -- a full time coordinator and a graduate assistant. It was pretty busy. And we had a very nice placement rate that was very similar to what career services has been doing with the general student population here at U.T. So that was really impressive to be able to talk about that. However, as with everything, we did have funding challenges regarding anything that we work with in higher education and in state funding or federal funding. There are funding challenges, and V. R. moved its order of selection down to its projects and we were cut significantly as far as the number of students we could see and serve and they wanted it only for those that were V. R. clients. And so that cut our numbers by 70 percent. So that was kind of a low point for us, but the next year, they ceased funding us and we worked it out that U.T. has now put us on hard money. So we're back in the game and we're doing quite well serving all students and a new coordinator is now in place, and she is doing a great job in enhancing the services now that D. C. O. offers. Let's talk about some of those services as we look to the next slide. She works one on one with these students, and when I mentioned here on the slide that we do some basic and resume and cover letter assistance, it really is very basic. It's talking about whether to disclose on the resume or the cover letter. And basically that is the extent of it because we're not looking to, again, replace career services. We encourage the students to seek internships. That is something that is extremely important to students with disabilities. It's also extremely important to what I do on a national basis with COSD and so we encourage them to seek out internships in career services. Also we host WRP which is the workforce reroute. Program which is an internship program for the federal government in the summer internships, and we've hosted them for the last six or seven years and have had very good success with them. We also refer them to other disability-specific programs and I'd be happy to point any of these out to you if you're unfamiliar with them, but among these programs are three different programs sponsored by AAPD, or two that I can talk about right now I think -- I can remember exactly -- but one is in partnership with Microsoft and is an IT internship program in the federal government; and then also another internship with the Mitsubishi electric American foundation which is congressional interns. Great programs and we've been able to send a couple of students to be a part of that and also at the Washington Center, they have a great internship program that is available to students during the semester. So they do fall and spring internships to kind of complement the workforce recruitment program. Emerging leaders is a private sector internship program, and we're the lead employers of Booz-Allen Hamilton and JPMorgan Chase and IBM, so these are more general type majors that they will be looking for. They really focus on accounting and business type majors, marketing, HR, that kind of stuff. They are very interested in finding students with that -- in that program. And then a technical internship for high tech majors, stem field science technology, engineering and math, those are found in the triple A. entry point program -- triple A. S. which is the American association for the advancement of sciences. They have a specific program for students with disabilities that was founded by IBM and between IBM and NASA, those are the two primary employers that really pull from those -- from that particular program. Many other high tech firms have been very successful in finding students with disabilities in those fields from that program. So she promotes a lot of these different things as they come down the pike, and we do that through E-mail, through personal communication when they come in the office, so this information always gets out to the number of students that we serve here at U.T. in this office. And then also there is a community outreach that she does quite extensively in working with V. R. in the local areas and also local employers and local agencies that would be willing to assist us as well. So she has a full plate to say the least, but it's a great program that is really helping a lot of students here. But on a national basis -- and I bring this up -- I discussed this in detail with you more as an example of what can be done and really illustrating the point of having that collaboration between disability services and career services. So this is one way of being able to do that and on a national basis, I've been going out and talking to universities all over the country and just saying, okay, well, this is one example. this is not going to work for everyone. Student populations are different, funding sources, level of other types of resource commitments are different, but this is one that has worked well. And other universities now -- the University of Rhode Island is looking at this model. Florida international university in Florida and Miami is looking at this so this is something that is starting to spread but is not for everyone. So I don't mean to say that this is the be all and end all, but this is certainly a great example of a program to achieve those goals. We can go on to the next slide, please. And to bring it altogether, as I alluded to and discussing the D. C. O, there is really three elements, three different constituencies that need to be brought together and this was the basis for forming COSD. After the research that we had done, we had made all of these great contacts and had met all these wonderful people who were committed to what we were looking at, and we wanted to keep them in the loop as to what things we were doing at the University of Tennessee and what might work for them. So that's how the consortium eventually turned into COSD which is really a national association now of more than 450 employers and universities with really higher education institutions and government agencies. So this is something that's really grown very nicely since we started it back in 2000. But to really get back to bringing it altogether, employers are a key part of this, obviously, since they are going to be prime customer for what we do. We want to see students employed, and the best way to do that is to prepare them to be competitive and have employers hire them. And now we've understood from all of these years of research and experience is that these employers are specifically searching for these students, and we need to figure out a way of making sure that they are prepared and that they are packaged -- I know that sounds kind of cold sometimes, but we need to really think about how a student can package himself, can market himself, because that's how we all get our jobs; but these folks really need to be very, very careful and very mindful of how they can package themselves and to make sure that they are competitive in this very competitive job market right now. So employers are out there searching for students. They also have specific recruiting programs that are very interesting and Microsoft, of course, is a leader in this. I'm sorry, IBM is also a leader. Merck is starting to emerge as a leader. So there are big companies out there that have developed ways of being able to recruit students with disabilities. They also have specialized personnel in disability services roles. Nordstrom, the department store, has a great person who is specifically and only looking at disability issues, whether they be for existing employees, but now more of her job is looking at fresh hires, looking at college graduates. So that is a very significant shift in the corporate world right now to really recognize disability as a great resource for them. And also we're starting to see that those who are already sophisticated in disability becoming more so and then some of the employers that we had talked to who were kind of searching for ways to be involved and to be able to find students with disabilities are also gaining sophistication. So this is a prime time to be working in the area of preparing students and really making sure that these folks are ready for the corporate world or for a career in whatever they choose to be going into. So to look at the next slide -- and again, bringing -- in keeping with the bringing it all together theme here, we need to talk about career services. That they are a vital piece of this. They are a key role as a liaison between the student and the employer, but we understand also, and they understand, that they need to be a little bit more mindful and helpful and attuned to the needs of students with disabilities. And that's something that I've been doing in training, getting out there and talking to these different universities and working with both career services and disability services to start that collaboration between them. And of course also C. COSD in doing that is encouraging career services to reach out to disability services. So that's very vital and we'll be seeing that repeated on the next slide when it comes to disability services. And one of the things, when I was working at -- in disability services here at Tennessee -- I worked there for three years. So I'm very, very understanding of the pressures and the resource pressures and the difficulties in working with students and making sure that we serve them in the best way we can. And it's definitely a challenge. I do understand all of that. I lived it for three years. But one of the things that I loved to hear was -- I heard this from several of my friends in disability services, and they all talk about the continuum of service, and the continuum of service really in my interpretation is looking at a perspective student that is coming to visit at a university and assisting them in determining whether this is something -- this is the type of university for them based on the accommodation that is they can receive at that university, all the way up to graduation day. And there is just so much that goes on between those two events; and so I really loved that term, that phrase, and what I'm looking at is trying to expand the continuum of service to not in greater length of time, but in looking at what we can do during the time that the student is here; and that is the recognition of careers and career development, career planning, really understanding that this is an essential part of a student's education. And this type of early planning, all the way throughout the entire time that the student is here, is so vital for a student with a disability. And that's something that we're looking to bring even more to disability services and that's why I'm so glad that Karen was able to work this out to bring this information to you. But also a part of that is to help disabilities -- I've been helping disability services really understand the difference between disclosure in a higher education situation as opposed to the workplace. Both are equally important, but the stakes are so much higher when you're looking at an interview situation or even disclosing to peers in a workplace. There is a great amount of risk in doing that, and that's why we stress so much time -- put so much time and stress into the idea of doing disclosure in the proper way, if that's what the student feels that they need to do. So there is a really good -- we spend a lot of time on that and present this in a very easy and logical way for the student. For those of how have already seen my presentation live, have probably gone through some of the exercises that I had -- that I would use in those presentations, but they are really extremely helpful to a student and great tools to them to really understand that difference. And we do that with disability services to help them understand that this is just a very different environment for disclosure. And then we also -- COSD, meaning me, I encourage involvement by disability services with the students and with employers, really helping to see what employers are looking for because, again, you guys as disability services professionals are the major point of contact for a student with a disability. Imparting these ideas and these things that are important when it comes to careers really starts at that point, at that point of contact. And also, again, on the flipside of the other slide, I encourage the outreach to career services and even just that outreach and that little bit of interaction and collaboration, even on a very basic level, has resulted in very significant improvements in the preparation of students with disabilities, just even having that and a little built of knowledge exchange and sharing of things. Next slide, please. Now I talked about a lot of things that are kind of idealistic and I'm sure some of you have been rightfully saying, oh, geez, okay, that's nice, but you know, does he realize that there are challenges out there? And I absolutely do. There are many challenges, and we'll just kind of tackle a couple of them today. And I hope that this will be helpful, but there are many ways of at least identifying the challenges and trying to minimize those things that will block really fully assisting the student in this area. Confidentiality is one of them. Confidentiality, sharing of student information between career services and disability services. I know that's an issue, and I know that that's something that is -- that is an issue with career services when a student may be referred to career services. Unless they know it comes from disability services, they may not know that that student even has the presence of a disability, let alone knowing anything else. And we're not advocating that we get -- that career services get stock invitation. That's not the issue. We're just trying to make sure that career services can provide the best services to them and feel that many of the issues that a student with disabilities have already been taken care of or at least discussed between the two offices somehow and we'll go into some of these things here. I wanted to -- one thing I wanted to really stress was the importance of having the entire disability services staff really believe in that collaboration with career services and employers as a way to assist student in preparation for graduation and that ultimate transition to the workforce. And that's important just so that they -- that your staffs will feel that they're included in this, and they are able to work with the staff of career services and feel that they are able to help students see the importance of having this contact with career services and being involved in their own career planning. Also I would suggest an outreach to career services to set guidelines. Obviously guidelines that would be within the policies of the university, but to really look at ways to be able to -- with the student's consent -- to be able to have that relationship back and forth in working with specific students. The need to find the best way to do this is with forms and procedures and all that stuff, so that's all, you know, specific to your institution so I just kind of through that on there. But also, students need to buy into the concept that they need to have the career preparation, that it's important, that it's something that will really be an asset to them as they graduate. So having that support from disability services is always another key to the success of that particular student. We can go on to the next slide. Some other suggestions -- this is just again talking about the student awareness of the importance if career preparation. Student understanding of the value of work experience. That's something that's very important, and again, as I mentioned earlier, that's something that employers are looking for. Is to have some level of work experience from student that are candidates that they are looking at. And even talking about getting a buy-in from deans and other senior management of universities, when possible, to help them see the value of the collaboration that will hopefully happen between disability services and career services. Another challenge is one that I always found, when I was working in the disability services office, is never enough time; but I have a couple of suggestions with that. Again, because your office is really the primary point of contact for students with disabilities. At each encounter, it would be great to have a staff member be able to ask a couple of simple questions to the students to help keep them thinking about this, to keep it in the front of their minds as they are progressing through their college career. Something for the first or second year is, have you chosen a major? Even career services can help them -- help students with that to be able to not counsel them, but to provide them materials that they can see where -- actually what the future of that particular major is. That's the second question. Have you thought about the future of that major? There is a program that many university career services has, it's called what can I do with this major? And that is a great tool for students to be able to identify majors that work the best for them. Another question is, would you like help with resume and a cover letter? That would be great. Even as early as sophomore year to start discussing that with them, just mentioning that question, all the way, of course, through their senior year. Hopefully they have been a little but further along before they get to their senior year to have a good idea of what their resume and cover letters should be looking like. Do you know which employers come to cam us? I mean, that's something that's important to students in their senior year and that's something that can be provided very quickly with just a list provided by career services to you, just as another conduit to reach these students. Would you like to know more about career services? Well, that can be done as a general question at any time through the career of the student. But that's something that would help to open up the idea of referring a student to a specific person over in career services. In many career services offices, personnel are broken down into specific tasks and areas, so that may be a good way to refer a student to a specific area or a specific person. And joint programs, mutual advertising 'of each other's programs, those are things that are important, and even asking for disability services to be a part of career services type programs to piggy back on that and to have some presence at some of these general sessions. It would be not everyone with a disability in those sessions, it probably would be a great majority of those without disabilities, but it would be a great way to expose students who may not be registered with you to disability services in a career sense as far as saying, okay, we will be able to support you incoming back over here to career services and working on your career preparation. So those are some of the challenges. I hope some of those suggestions are at least plausible for you and will work for you in some way. And we can move on to the next slide -- oh, the last challenge -- I'm sorry. The last challenge is talking about not enough knowledge. I'm not asking -- I would never be asking disability services personnel to be career services experts. We're not looking for that. Just enough information to be able to talk with a student to know to answer -- ask those questions and to be able to really continue to keep that in the forefront of the student's mind. Again, you know, knowing who to refer a student to for a specific issue, stressing the importance of the career search, having career services as part of your toolbox, along with advising services, counseling services and other offices on your campus for a student that you would refer to those different services. And also to reach out to career services for basic in-service training. I mean, that's another way of being able to get just enough knowledge for the staff of disability services to feel comfortable in talking with a student about this area of their careers at a university. And to summarize this presentation, just a few points to make sure that we do this -- I'm sorry, that's on the next slide. And that is that we're working with an unemployment rate that's estimated to be near 40 percent for college graduates with disabilities. There are resources on campus to help these students find appropriate careers; and disability services being the primary connection to students with disabilities is vital to refer those students to these resources including career services. And disability services is also vital to keep careers in the front of student's minds. I mean that, is critical to keep that little seed of thinking right there for these students. And, of course, as you always do with everything, is to be encouraging to the student and really help them see that this is something that they need to keep working on throughout their college career. And I just wanted to have one quick commercial, Aaron, if I may, please. As we look at the next slide, which is my contact information, but just in speaking about the exposure to career services and the exposure to employers, one of the best ways to be able to achieve that is to consider coming to the COSD seventh annual national conference, which will be in June, on June 14th to the 16th, in Atlanta, and it will be at the Hyatt regency, Atlanta hotel downtown, great location, right in the middle of everything, and we'll have a great program of wonderful speakers and great presentations, a banquet and also a disability oriented entertainment. We have been very successful with these for the last -- at this level, the last three or four years, and this, again, is our seventh one, and we'd love to have more disability services folks come to that particular conference. It's a great way to network with folks from all over the country in different disciplines to meet with employers, to meet with government folks who are all interested in recruiting students with disabilities and then to kind of share stories with other disability services professionals and probably a lot of them your friends. Your friends at AHEAD and other organizational conferences, and be able to really work with and meet with career services professionals as well. So I'd like to open it up for questions and, Aaron, if you'll take that away, please. >> AARON: Well, we have quite a few of them. Actually glad that we proceeded in a workman like way because I can't say I've had this many questions before, and they are all really good. So I'm going to kind of go through them more or less in the order they came. There is a question from one caller, how are you able to come up with the estimate of unemployment percentage for your students? >> ALAN: Well, basically, I know that this number is significantly less than what disability -- other disability literature has come up with, but we need to also recognize that the -- that overall number is somewhere between 60 to 85 percent of people talk about is including every demographic category, and what we looked at was the 18 to 29-year-old demographic category on the U.S. census and then we also looked at the National Organization on Disability Harris Poll and a number of other pieces of information, and what we were trying to do is to look at that 18 to 29 and come up with some way of being able to assume that not all of them are college graduates or have been to college at all. So there had to be some assumptions made, and what we looked at, the best way, we talked about this with a lot of different experts and they feel it's a reasonably good number is right around 40 percent. So I mean, that number is going to fluctuate and change over time, but it doesn't seem to have changed all that much and even in the time that we've been working on this. >> AARON: a related follow-up question from someone else, have you a new set of data tracking unemployment and underemployment of graduates with disabilities over the time of your program? >> ALAN: No, we haven't because that's, again, very difficult to track as I'm sure you know. When we talk to employers, they didn't have any idea of how many people with disabilities they had in their workforce. The reason they don't know is because it's a voluntary disclosure of a disability, and the only way they would even have close to an estimate if they were willing to even reveal that is by counting those that they see that are obvious disabilities or those that had disclosed that they have a disability. But, you know, that's information that's extremely hard to come by, so based on that, it's hard -- we're trying to come up with ways of being able to track college graduates with disabilities as they go out into the workforce. There are -- nearly every university has some way of tracking the general population of students to see where they land after graduation, but that is something we've run into, a number of obstacles within the universities to be able to identify opinion specifically identify those students and to be able to track them. And we're not talking about tracking them longitudinally, but basically within a six months after graduation to see where they land if they are employed or still looking, still seeking or if they are in grad school or other pursuits. So it's hard to also get that kind of data that it would be actually comparable between different institutions, because different institutions track things differently. So that's something that we are going to be working on over the next couple of years, again, to kind of come up with -- well, to come up with some type of uniform method of being able to track of how students do after they graduate. >> AARON: Okay, and we have a question -- do you U.T. students with disabilities or did U.T. students with disabilities resist seeking out the services of COSD or of your career organization on that campus? Did they come willingly and what kind of outreach methods specifically did U.T. use? >> ALAN: Well, the referral process to the DCO, and it still is, is through V. R. and through the office of disability services. And, yes, they come willingly. They are concerned about their preparation and what they want to do after graduation. So, yes, they definitely seek it out. We do do a lot of promotion. At the beginning of every semester, there is an E-mail blast that goes out to all registered students and also we identify V. R. students who are funded by V. R. through our burr sar's office to be able to send E-mails to those folks, and all we're basically doing is offering our services to them. It's not a hard sell of any kind, and those actually -- even though they are very scatter shot -- have been quite successful. Nothing beats the personal referral from a V. R. counselor or from a staff member in disability services. >> AARON: Okay. The next question is, are there any incentives for businesses that hire employees with disabilities? And do you make them aware of that while educating potential employers? >> ALAN: Oh, yes, absolutely. There is tax incentives. There are a number of different incentives, but what we've found is that incentives are good. Incentives are great, but that's not why a company is going to hire a person with a disability. They're going to hire that person because they are the best fit for that job, and that's the reason why we're trying to make sure that the preparation level is sufficient to make those particular students competitive and be able to really stand out enough or actually to be at a par with those that don't have disabilities. When you're really looking at it from an employer's standpoint, let's say you have two resumes in your hand. One is from a student with a disability that you don't know that has a disability. High GPA, but really no other work experience; and then you have in the other hand a student with a little bit lower GPA but is the president of everything that's available on campus, has done every internship, co-op and summer job known to man, has done a lot of different things, has done a lot of things on his own. You know, you're going to be looking at those two. As an employer, which one are you going to choose? You're going to choose the person with the greater leadership and work experience. That is the reason why we try to encourage as much as we can students with disabilities to get involved on campus, to have those leadership experiences and to be involved in whatever internships are available through career services or through any of those specialized disability specific programs that we talked about in the presentation. >> AARON: Well, I've got to honor a couple of questions directly from Tennessee, and the questions are as follows: Do you serve students throughout the U.T. system? And again, that's the other U.T, the University of Tennessee, in the various cities where there are U.T. universities? Do you serve people from outside the U.T. system? And do you find that Tennessee career centers or one stops to be helpful to college graduates with disabilities? >> ALAN: Well, okay. I'll take -- I'll try to answer all phases of that. To Disability Careers Office that I was discussing and showing as an example is basically only at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, which is the main campus. We have attempted to have that spread to other schools in Tennessee, and we have spoken to University of Memphis and to a couple of other schools. We've also talked to University of Tennessee Chattanooga about setting up an office just like this. But what they have chosen to do, and hopefully they're even on the phone here, but they have chosen to do something on a smaller scale and have been very successful in working with students with disabilities in this career field. And I know at Memphis there has been a very close relationship between career services and disability services there as I visited there a couple of different times. There are a number of examples throughout, you know, the country as well as in Tennessee where just even the introduction of that type of collaboration has made a huge difference. As far as Tennessee one stops, we have found that not -- well, I can't really answer that as a broad brush statement. I can talk about certainly on an anecdotal basis that for students with a college degree who have a disability, the one-stop centers have been of some help, but again, the best help is to be introduced to employers through career services. Many schools all across the country, and not just here in Tennessee, are really -- have career services offices that work with Alums, and that is something that's very important. I get E-mails from even parents of recent grads, sometimes not so recent grads, with people with disabilities who ask me, well, can you help us with this? And my first suggestion is to go back to that particular student's Alma matter and reconnect with career services. It really seems to be the best way to connect through that office to employers. And employers are also looking for nontraditional students with some experience who may now just have a recent degree. So that is something that is still an option for people who are recent grads and those who are not so recent grads to continue to go back and maintain contact with their Alma matter's career services. >> AARON: All right, we have a request from an individual who says that they have written a grant requested to fund a similar program at a larger state university. One of the barriers they found was that they had difficultly clearly demonstrating the distinction between disability services and career services and that potential program as a liaison office. And they ask what ways did you and do you clearly delineate the differences between those programs to avoid the appearance of overlap? >> ALAN: Well, how we did this -- and that's why I tried to be careful in explaining that we're not replicating either office -- but I think the way we looked at this was that the disability careers office is just working with the student to work on those specific issues that are related to that individual's disability. And disability services does a great job in providing accommodations and working with students with disabilities to level the academic playing field; and that is -- that's their role. All I'm asking for is to -- suggesting here is that they expand a little bit by introducing the idea of career development and career planning. Now, the real folks who are going to be doing the dull, quote-unquote, heavy lifting or really heavy training with a student or counseling with them is going to be your career services professional over in career services. And that takes the pressure off disability services to say, oh, God, now I've got to be a career expert. No, we're not looking for that. We're looking for referral. We're looking for preparation to be referred over to career services. Now, whether you do this the way we did it, which was having a separate office and a separate person that would do that level of individual preparation, that's up to you guys to make that decision, but I would say that it can be done. It has been done. A great model is Adolphi University in Long Island where they have adopted many of these principles but have not made a separate office. A lot of that preparation that we do in a separate office is done in disability services and then there is a team of folks in career services that coordinator in disability services refers the student to. So there is a number of ways to do that and that's why I was stressing here that this is just one possible solution to achieve that. >> AARON: Okay. We have a question from a -- it looks like a civilian recruiter for a federal agency that raises a very specific and interesting question. Are there staff (Inaudible) willingness to relocate for a job opportunity at many job fairs if this person attends they find that people with disabilities -- many of those participants indicate that they are unwilling to relocate depending on the position, many federal positions can offer relocation bonuses and would certainly require it. >> ALAN: Absolutely. That is a concern, and I think that that -- and it depends obviously on the situation, but in many situations that I've been a party to having some improvement in strengthening of self-advocacy skills does help the student understand that, yes, they can do this in another location. Now, if there is specific health reasons that prevent that and that it's totally out of the question, that's a different story. But if we're talking about a lower level of concern as far as the health care or personal care assistance, that kind of thing, that's something that -- and that's the reason why -- I'm sorry to jump around -- but that's one reason why involvement in the WRP program and the Washington Center and a couple of other government-specific programs really helps students see that they can make that transition to a different location. And we stress that with those students, not to put pressure on them, but to say, you know, that this is something that may be required. How are you going to work with this? Let's work on strategies to be able to accommodate this. And that's something that seems to have been very successful with many students who we really thought would never relocate and have and have done very well. You know, I can think of several that I've met over the years at conferences who have moved from the Midwest to D. C. and had very significant disabilities, but were able to make that transition and relocation. It can be done. >> AARON: Okay. Have you ever encountered a situation in which a student's level of disability is such that realistically he or she cannot be competitive with their peers and, if so, how have you handled that situation? >> ALAN: Well, that's a very good question. I think it would, again, depend on the situation, but if it was something that -- it's the type of disability that would render a person uncompetitive, then there are -- well, it depends on what that person is looking to do. Then we would probably work with that student to identify areas that would be more suited to the level of ability, meaning the level of capability and being competitive, whether that would be a different place. That's a hard question to really answer because I would really need to start seeing some of those a little more specifics on that, but I can tell you that we have encountered that. We have tried to help the student adjust what they want to do and to be able to rethink strategies to help them be competitive, but in a very general, hypothetical situation, it's kind of hard to really answer that unless we start talking about specifics. >> AARON: Well, the next one -- it's actually kind of three questions, but they sort of stack nicely, so I'll give them to you and I'll be more than happy to repeat if necessary. Has your project addressed situations where departments emphasize internships or practicums, required civic service, and/or student teaching more than career development? What about those more stand alone career services within graduate professionals programs? Have you had any luck reaching to those departments? >> ALAN: Well, let's see, the first one is that when dealing with required work experience, I know that after talking with Northeastern University, for example, that really basically no student in engineering and many disciplines there, they can't graduate without having some sort of co-op. They have been a model of adapting things to student with disabilities. They have been a model in counseling students and working with them and really leveling the whole idea so that they are competitive with other students that don't have disabilities. So that would be a good place to start to look at that particular issue. As far as one of the other parts of the question was talking about -- help me, Aaron. >> AARON: Stand alone career service office. >> ALAN: Stand alone career services and professional disciplines like law and medical school and even nursing. Those are difficult areas to crack and to really get in there and work with people and help them to understand the need for more interaction with people with disabilities. I'm doing a presentation to a group of law school placement professionals in April -- at the end of April. So I'll report back to you after I have that interaction to see how things go with that, but law schools are difficult to work with in the fact that they really do have their own career services. They have their own networks, which can be a benefit or can be really a detriment to people with disabilities. And that's something that is really not a group kind of effort. It's one student at a time to see that they go through. I know here at disability services or here at U.T. with disability services, we have had challenges with our vet school -- our veterinary school and it's a similar situation with people with some neurological type disabilities as to whether they would be able to handle certain situations. We've had to be creative with the vet school to help them understand that they can do it. So it's really, like I said, a one student at a time individual kind of thing, but that's the reason why I'm very pleased to have that opportunity to go and talk to these law school placement professionals and give them a little bit of an idea about what students with disabilities are dealing with on campus and some strategies for them to be more effective in working with these students. I can't really say that there are established strategies to do that. Another issue is -- that's kind of related to that -- are universities, particularly in the Midwest, that have decentralized career services, meaning that individual schools within the universities have their own career services. And that is a big challenge, and what we try to do in those areas -- and I know this has been done at the University of Minnesota and Illinois -- that they have been working with the specific colleges that are -- contain the majors that would cover most students with disabilities. So it would be more in business. It would be in the arts and sciences areas. So they've been concentrating on working with those specific career services offices and then eventually branching out to others to reach them. So I know that's not much of an answer, but that is what is happening out there to assist in these areas. But like I said, law schools are something that we're working on, and that particular presentation will be highly interesting to see what we can do to break into that area. >> AARON: Well, the next one is a little bit of a compliment and a question as well. The questioner commends you on doing employment development in the education of employers, but again, emphasizes the importance of internships and other placements for students in the course of pursuing their degree. They ask what is the obligation that pseudojob site has and/or the department with regards to meeting the needs of students with disabilities in placement? >> ALAN: Okay, I missed the last part of that -- pseudojob sites? >> AARON: They are talking about I guess internship placements or work study -- not work study placements. It says internship placements. >> ALAN: That kind of stuff. I believe that that is the -- that is the key to success for many students with disabilities. You know, it relieves the pressure on both sides of the equation, the student and the employer, because it's really a no lose situation. You're talking about having a real work experience, having the student learn even just the general behavior that you should have in a workplace. And that's something that is of great concern to employers when they are working with students with disabilities, whether that's a true thing or not, that is the perception. So the best way to knock down that perception is to have a position that is temporary, you know, six to 12 weeks, and to allow the student to become familiar with the company, to practice some of the self-advocacy skills and disclosure skills with coworkers there, just to gain confidence in working with people who they have not grown up with or that they have not been in a close relationship with on a college campus. That's the scary part for many students, no matter whether they have a disability or not, but really specifically for students with disabilities, it's very important that they gain that kind of experience and it really has that exposure to other folks that they may not necessarily know. And then on the flipside to employers, they get to see whether -- to see that accommodations are really not as big of a deal as they may have imagined. Now, that's the big concern that we hear all the time from employers even though there is all kinds of information about accommodations out there and how relatively cheap they are, you know, 90 percent are under $500. Still close to half are free, so I mean, those are things that an employer will start to see that this is more of a common sense issue rather than a dollars and cents issue. So I think that that's very important to have that and -- you know, from two perspectives -- three perspectives actually, to work on their disclosure and self-advocacy skills, and other kinds of things that would be related and needed for their permanent placement when they do come up with one. Also to feel comfortable in the work environment and to see that they are -- whether they like that particular industry or that particular job area, and then really to have that work experience be on their resume, whether it's something they liked or didn't like, but at least they have work experience that they can point to to be competitive with another student that doesn't have a disability. >> AARON: All right, I think we have enough time for at least one more, maybe two more questions before we have to close. These are two really good ones out of the five or six good ones I'm looking at. Have you been able to identify -- excuse me. Do you think that lessons learned from working with larger employers can translate well into public employers and smaller employers? >> ALAN: Yes, to a degree. I think that the advantage of working with larger employers is that they have the resources to specialize and work with specific types of populations. You know, diversity is a huge issue among every employer, but the ones that do the best job are ones that are larger. And that's something that I've been working very hard in the last -- well, really the whole time, is helping those employers that are focused on diversity to include disability as part of that diversity plan. And that's one reason why the employers that we talked to in the research were so enthusiastic about this because they are looking for avenues and tools to get to students with disabilities, to be frank, to fulfill their diversity plan. And if they can get a quality employee out of that and satisfy their diversity, then it's a win-win for them. And it ends up being a win for the student, too. So I think -- I really think that that's important. Now, whether it goes to -- well, public employers, we're talking about government here -- they are already under mandates to hire people with disabilities. If we're talking about government agencies, they have very specific mandates and things that they are working with, and they are working with me and COSD very carefully to identify ways of getting to students with disabilities to fulfill those mandates of increasing the number of employees with significant disabilities in the federal government. And then going to smaller employers, that's -- that's again another issue that is going to be down the road for us because we need to really -- really have the big employers be the model and then to start trickling that down to the medium sized and eventually to the smaller employer, the small business. But that's something that we're definitely looking at. There are challenges with each level of corporate size. So that's something that we're going to be developing as we go along, but right now, we're having a great deal of success with the larger companies and we're going to continue with that for the foreseeable future. >> AARON: I think that's about all the time we have. And I do need to close. I want to thank -- give my thanks to Mr. Alan Muir, again, for agreeing to present. Thank you, Alan. >> ALAN: Thank you. >> AARON: In closing, I've -- I hope all of you have had a good time and I know you've learned a lot by listening to today's webcast. I want everybody to know that this webcast will be archived on the ILRU website in its entirety, which you can find by visiting www.ilru.org. That's www.ilru.org. You can also check out the ILRU website for upcoming webcasts. I believe -- let's see, looks like two weeks from now, on Wednesday, February 22nd, at 2:00 p.m. central standard time, we have a webcast that is actually a part 2 of an earlier webcast that's already archived. It's part 2 of the SSDI and SSI webcast on social security work incentives, presented by our own Jackie Brennan, an attorney working with the Disability Law Resource Project. Before closing, I'd like to acknowledge National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, or NIDRR, who funds your host for today's programs, my employer, the Disability Law Resource Project. I encourage anyone with questions on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act to call our toll free technical assistance number at 1-800-949-4232. I would also like to thank the in-house staff of ILRU who without their efforts this webcast would certainly not be possible, and they include our webcast team of Tanjauna Dunning, Marj Gordon, Sharon Finney, Dawn Heinsohn, Vinh Nguyen as well as the technical expertise provided by Rob Dickehuth and our realtime captioner Marie Bryant. Hello, Marie and Rob. Thanks again, and we hope that you'll be available to participate and learn from our webcast on February 22nd on social security. You guys all have a good day.