According to Walters, the employment rate for students who complete Clemson’s four-year program is 100 percent. In other words, it’s working.

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In 1912, the psychologist Henry Goddard wrote in his study of the “Kallikak” family that, “no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one.” Goddard was part of the eugenics movement, which put forward the belief that certain characteristics can be passed from one generation to the next: People with “desirable” traits should have children to continue the strong line of positive attributes, and people with “undesirable” traits should be sterilized. Those with intellectual disabilities fell into the latter category.

The work done at Clemson, where the idyllic, brick campus seems to recede to reveal the jaw-droppingly gigantic football stadium known as “Death Valley,” and other programs like it contradicts Goddard’s idea that education cannot provide some sort of pathway to success for the intellectually disabled.

Though fewer than 6 percent of certification-granting institutions in the United States have these types of programs, the growth in contemporary options has been promising, said Meg Grigal, an expert on inclusive higher education and a principal investigator at Think College, an initiative at the University of Massachusetts Boston working to expand inclusive higher-education opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities. Grigal said that, as recently as the 1990s, programs for this population typically offered few class choices, often setting out a prescribed curriculum with less individual latitude.

Today, however, the story is unfolding differently.

Grigal said that in the early 2000s, there was just a “smattering” of higher-education options for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and little faith that postsecondary schooling could become a reality for this population. With the passage of the Higher Education Opportunities Act in 2008, the U.S. government altered the requirements for Title IV financial-aid dollars. The law waived certain restrictions—specifically that a student must have earned a high-school diploma and be matriculating toward a degree—to qualify for federal money, increasing access and affordability of higher education for intellectually disabled students: “That was a huge game-changer,” Grigal said. “Prior to this, people with intellectual disabilities were not Title IV eligible, so that meant anybody who didn’t have the means—and college is expensive, and if you’re already supporting a student with disabilities, there may be other fiscal impacts on your family’s life—couldn’t go to college.”

In 2009, about 149 programs at two-year, four-year, and trade schools existed across the country, according to Think College estimates—that number has grown by about 77 percent in the eight years since. That’s in part because the Department of Education started funding Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TIPSID) grants, issuing the first round in 2010. Twenty-seven projects across the country were funded for intellectually disabled students over the course of five years, and Grigal said that the programs tended to focus on three broad areas: independent living (which is the bucket ClemsonLIFE falls into), academic access, and employment.

The ACE-IT in College Program at Virginia Commonwealth University was started thanks to a TIPSID grant and is focused on preparing students with intellectual disabilities for the workforce. “We want to make sure that they are really looking to heighten their career awareness and what they would like to be doing,” said Elizabeth Getzel, the program’s director. “We see employment as a gateway to getting into the employment sector, but also for being in arenas where there’s opportunity for growth and movement up, just like anyone.”