Hard of hearing students. Historically, society has given much less attention to the education of hard of hearing students than it has to the education of students who are deaf. This is due in large part to the perception that to be hard of hearing as a child is less educationally challenging than to be deaf, and it follows that fewer adaptations (and special resources) need be provided. As a generalization, this may be so. However, this characterization ignores factors such as degree and type of hearing loss, age at onset, use and quality of amplification, and personal/social concomitants.³ Sometimes too, the condition is entirely overlooked or misdiagnosed as some other condition simply because the behavioral correlates of partial hearing were not understood, especially in children.

Many severely hard of hearing students have blended educationally with deaf students, sharing the resources essentially designed for deaf students and often joining the culture established by people who are deaf. With perseverance and appropriate amplification, others have had successful college experiences with little or no special accommodation. Still others have struggled on the educational and social fringes of those who are hearing and those who are deaf, sometimes referring to themselves as "neither fish nor fowl".

Unlike deaf students, those who are hard of hearing have never had much of a communication "network". They have never had their own schools or teachers who shared their disability. Nor have they had the backing of strong national and regional organizations of hard of hearing adults to serve as their advocates. With the emergence of Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH) as a strong national organization, perhaps for the first time hard of hearing students will have the advocacy they need.

This having been said, why are we addressing postsecondary educational needs and services of both deaf and hard of hearing students under one cover? First, these are not two dichotomous groups of students. A student who is hard of hearing based on a criterion such as hearing loss, may be deaf based on his or her self-perception and identity. The converse also applies. Second, there remains considerable overlap in the special needs of many deaf and hard of hearing students in the postsecondary educational setting, e.g., notetaking, assistive listening and signaling devices, captioning, and speech and hearing services.

By the same token, it would be a major disservice to both hard of hearing and deaf students if we were to assume that their special needs were identical. One prominent educator and hard of hearing advocate has expressed the following position:

The needs of the average college student who is hard of hearing will not be met by enrolling him or her in one of the 145 postsecondary programs specifically designed for students who are "deaf". There is a large conceptual and functional difference between individuals who are hard of hearing, those whose primary communication mode is auditorally-based, and people who are deaf, whose primary mode of communication is visually-based. (Ross, 1990)

PRESENT COLLEGE ENROLLMENTS

The most current demographic information about deaf and hard of hearing students in two and four-year colleges ⁴ is for the 1992-93 academic year. This information was gathered and reported by the National Center for Educational Statistics (Lewis, Farris, and Greene, 1994) and is based on college and university reports of numbers of students who identified themselves to their institutions as being deaf or hard of hearing, and included a large third group of students for whom information distinguishing between the two was not available.⁵

Number of enrolled deaf and hard of hearing students. An estimated 22,540 ⁶ deaf and hard of hearing students were enrolled in two and four-year colleges in the United States during the 1992-93 academic year. This represents about one in a thousand of all students enrolled in two and four-year colleges.

Of these 22,540 students, 7,020 were identified as deaf and 7,770 as hard of hearing. For the remaining 7,750 students, colleges did not distinguish between the two categories. Assuming these students were distributed similar to the proportion identified in each of the two categories, an estimated 10,700 (47.5%) were deaf and 11,840 (52.5%) were hard of hearing.

³ See "Diversity among students: Hearing loss" later in this report for an audiometric distinction between deaf and hard of hearing students.
⁴ The term "colleges" as used throughout this publication is inclusive of universities.
⁵ The following statistics, unless otherwise stated, are from the 1994 NCES publication.
⁶ The NCES total enrollment estimate did not include the two national programs, Gallaudet University and NTID in its data, so 2,500 students have been added to this number.