Over the cliff:

The period between ages 18 and 28 is critically important in establishing a foundation for adult life. For young people with autism, these years tend to be especially challenging. More than 66 percent of young adults on the spectrum do not secure a job or enroll in further education during the first two years after high school. Even two to four years later, nearly half are still not working or in school, according to the 2015 National Autism Indicators Report, produced by the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia. And they struggle in other ways: One in four young adults on the spectrum is socially isolated, according to the report; only one in five has ever lived independently by their early 20s. Many also have two or more physical or mental health conditions in addition to autism, making it difficult to meet these milestones of adulthood.

In fact, the limited number of studies on young adults who have autism show that many lose ground once they leave school. While teens with autism are in high school, their autism features generally tend to improve over time, but progress slows dramatically after graduation. In a 2010 study, researchers found that once adolescents leave school, any improvement they had shown in repetitive behaviors, reciprocal social interactions and communication basically stalls. Meanwhile, those who had shown progress in problem behaviors such as self-injury and aggression backslide. “We found that when they left high school, that improvement slowed down a ton and in some cases even stopped,” says Taylor, who led the study.

The likely reason, Taylor and other researchers say, is that support for adolescents vanishes after graduation.

During high school, 97 percent of young people on the spectrum get some type of publicly funded help, according to the Drexel report, which is based on U.S. government statistics. For example, at age 17, about 66 percent of individuals with autism receive speech and language services; after high school, that dwindles to 10 percent. Similarly, the proportion of those receiving occupational or life skills therapy diminishes from more than half to just under one-third.

For many years, these problems weren’t even on researchers’ radar. “For the longest time, people were thinking about children and how to intervene in childhood,” Taylor says. It wasn’t until about a decade ago that she and other researchers began working to fill the gap — and encountered daunting obstacles.

For example, Vanderbilt University has an extensive autism research program, so when Taylor began studying young adults in 2009, she thought it would be easy to connect to potential study participants through the network. “I didn’t expect at all that it would be difficult to find families,” she says. She found that, in fact, it was “incredibly difficult” and much harder than persuading young children or their families to participate.

That may be because the autism community tends to be more tightly knit among families with younger children. Once children are older, families may not be as eager to participate in research because they no longer anticipate the kind of ‘quick fix’ they may once have hoped for.

Funding agencies also tend not to be interested in supporting studies that might help to tease out why the years after high school are difficult and disorienting, researchers say. That’s especially true for studies on services to help young people with autism transition to adulthood.

The overwhelming majority of autism research is focused on children. Between 2008 and 2012, only 1 percent of federal research funding for autism went to study issues of adulthood, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. “The emphasis on brain and biology really pulls away from those kinds of studies,” says Catherine Lord, director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. “It’s very hard to get funding for something that doesn’t have some kind of biological marker.”

Funding agencies also generally prefer research that explores ‘mechanisms’ underlying autism. That typically implies a biological approach, which further limits the scope of research, Lord says. “Most [scientists], when they are looking for mechanisms, are looking for things that can be easily translated into animal models.”

She proposes that scientists could interpret the idea of a mechanism more broadly, evaluating therapies that improve conversational skills or other aspects of daily living. Some evidence indicates that adults with strong adaptive living skills — such as communication and social skills, personal hygiene, cooking, cleaning and ability to use public transportation — are more likely to be employed and to be better integrated into their communities than those with poorer skills. But so far, not much research has explored adaptive functioning during the transition to adulthood for people on the spectrum.

Young adults have participated in numerous autism studies over the years — many imaging studies have scanned their brains, for example. But those studies, although interesting to researchers, typically don’t have much direct impact on the participants’ quality of life.

In some cases, the young adults themselves may be resistant. Isaac Law, for one, doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as ‘autism.’ “Most people labeled autistic are just plain oddballs,” he says. He rejects the diagnosis and has no interest in participating in studies — even though both his parents are autism researchers.