UCLA

Adults with Autism spectrum disorder are more likely to be unemployed and unengaged in post-secondary education opportunities compared to their peers with and without disabilities. The negative employment and post-secondary educational outcomes may be related to specific or combination of individual, family, community, and school factors. Studies have highlighted the differences in employment and educational outcomes based on ethnicity\race, socio-economic status (SES), cognitive level, gender, adaptive functioning, and parent\family involvement. However, these studies tend to be over represented by middle to upper class white males, which can lead to misleading findings or limit the generalizability of results. The current study will use a large dataset from a diverse metropolitan school district to provide descriptive information of the students with ASD who received Work Based Learning (WBL), a vocational strategy to promote employment and educational outcomes. There are 3 goals of the study, 1) characterize autism eligible students that participated in WBL, 2) investigate the predictors of WBL participation in autism eligible students, and 3) characterize the post-secondary outcomes (employment and education) of autism eligible students that participated in WBL experiences. Findings from this study will further our understanding of which autism eligible students are receiving WBL opportunities and which ones might benefit most from WBL experiences.