Off to college on the autism spectrum

My youngest son is in his junior year of high school and already planning to attend a four year college. Being on the autism spectrum, so much anxiety has surmounted these past few months. I have concerns over whether he will be able to make friends, will he be able to tend to his basic needs, will he get enough to eat, will he have struggles doing laundry, will he be lonely, will other students look at him strangely because of his spectrum behaviors, will professors not be accommodating, etc.

My son doesn’t like to think of himself as autistic and does pretty well mainstreaming into society. He even got his driver’s license this summer. Still, there are struggles and I continue to ask and encourage him to take on new responsibilities to prepare him to be more autonomous. Some of these responsibilities result in an anxious response that I don’t expect. For example, I ordered sandwiches for both him and his brother at Pot Belly’s thru the App and asked him to pick up the order. Apparently when he arrived, the order was not ready and not sitting on the take out shelf. He waited for 10 minutes and still no order. He texted me and I suggested he ask someone working there about the order. He learned they had given the order to the wrong person and they would need to make new sandwiches. He came home very anxious and yelling that he had to wait too long. I was surprised he got so anxious. My question then was will this anxiety appear with other unexpected events while in college.

Discussing which college to attend, my husband and I have been encouraging colleges that are an hour or less away without being too obvious. We feel that the closer he is to home the safer he will be since he can drive home quickly or we can get to him fairly quickly if a problem arises. We also started questioning whether some colleges offer support services. Luckily, with some google searches we found a site that offers a very extensive search engine of colleges nationally with autism support programs in place. This was both refreshing and disappointing. We were happy to learn of the programs but also disheartened that many of the colleges were an extensive drive away.

For those interested in the neuro-diversity friendly colleges search engine click here:

https://www.topcollegeconsultants.com/autism-in-college/

We are still in the process of navigating the college direction, and I will update you as new decisions/events develop. He has picked a few colleges, one of which offers the support program. The downside of this college is that it’s private and would be three times the cost of a public school. We also question whether he will attend the program meetings or blow them off deciding he doesn’t need the support. One positive is that the school is one hour away.

If anyone else reading this is also in the process of sending an autistic high schooler off to college, I would love to hear your comments. Thanks and best wishes!