UC San Diego

This qualitative methods study draws on Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, 1991), specifically intersectionality and microaggressions (Sue, 2010), to understand the experiences of Deaf college graduates in terms of the supports and barriers they recalled during their post- secondary education. Much of the research on deaf students in higher education pertains to White deaf students enrolled at colleges that have been organized specifically for deaf students or at mainstream settings that service a large population of deaf students. Little research has focused on the experiences of Deaf students in colleges that serve only a few deaf students. The study participants included 15 Deaf individuals who graduated from one of three types of universities : Gallaudet, mainstream, or mainstream with a deaf program (mainstream/ DHH). A semi-structured, open-ended interview was used to elicit Deaf graduates' recollections of their undergraduate college experiences in regards to supports and barriers, as well as the ways in which aspects of their identity, other than deafness, emerged during that time. In hopes of gaining insight into how Deaf college graduates make sense of their post-secondary experiences, and how these experiences vary by identity and institutional factors, this study addressed three questions : 1) What do Deaf college graduates identify as supports or hindrances in their college experiences?; 2) how do these perceptions of supports and barriers vary by the type of post-secondary institutions they attended, whether it was a college for specifically for deaf students, or a mainstream setting?; and 3) What other features of their identity, (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, and gender) in addition to deafness do they identify as having affected their college experiences? The study yielded three findings. First, there are no institutional or social supports that are not, for some people and in some contexts, also barriers and vise versa. Secondly, each type of post-secondary setting provided supports to the participants but, what are perceived as barriers, varied across the three types of environments. Finally, the structural and cultural features of a Deaf student's university affect which facet of one's identity becomes more salient