What Subjects Do Dyslexic Students Study at University?

A report on an investigation in 2003 to understand more about what subjects students with dyslexia study at university

Background:

As a supplier of software and hardware students with dyslexia through the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) we frequently get asked to provide software and equipment which are specific to the student’s course. Because of the wide range of courses available in higher education it can be very difficult for us to anticipate and support what the student will require, an issue also raised by staff working with students. We decided to investigate if there were any figures available which listed the subjects that had a particularly high proportion of dyslexic students. We also felt this would be interesting to look at for other reasons including:

Are dyslexic students choosing particular subjects because of their particular talents in that area due to their disability (e.g. a dyslexic student choosing a design degree because of their high visual processing skills)?
Are dyslexic students choosing particular subjects to avoid areas they may struggle with (e.g. choosing science or engineering degrees because they are perceived to be less reliant on writing skills than languages and humanities)?
Are dyslexic students choosing particular career paths, such as nursing, teaching and psychology, because they want to help children and adults who have experienced similar problems to themselves?
Are dyslexic students gaining equal access to higher education compared to non-dyslexic students?

Method:

Our first port of call was to ask the people actually working with dyslexic students in HE. We emailed the DIS-Forum email group and attracted numerous replies. The responses ranged from anecdotal evidence to detailed breakdown of the number of dyslexic students in each subject area. Overall the replies showed that dyslexic students could be found in all subject areas but many people felt there was a bias towards art and practical based courses such as design, agriculture and nursing. The data provided by particular institutions is biased to the subjects that are available and those that have the most students.

So to get the full picture we acquired the full breakdown of student numbers by subject and disability from HESA (the Higher Education Statistical Agency) for the academic year 2001/2002. This data was broken down into 160 different subjects and covered all students registered in UK institutions during the 2001-2002 academic year. These 160 subjects could be grouped into 19 more general areas used by the Higher Education Academy . A student is only classified into a disability category if they declare it, so the data are not a complete representation of the total student population.

Results:

Overall Figures:

According to HESA figures 1.97% of all undergraduate students are dyslexic. This drops to 0.75% at postgraduate level. The British Dyslexia Association estimate that 4% of the population are severely dyslexic and another 6% encounter mild to moderate difficulties. The large drop in the proportion of dyslexic students at post-graduate level may indicate that dyslexic students, even with the help of the DSA, are not overcoming all their difficulties and are finding it hard to achieve the level necessary to enter post-graduate education. However, we must take into account that the DSA has only been available at post-graduate level since 1998 and students before that time (who make up a small proportion of the figures) may not have declared their dyslexia as it would not have gained them any tangible benefit.

Subject areas:

We examined two factors on a subject level:

The proportion of dyslexic students to non-dyslexic students in each subject. This was to examine whether dyslexic students were equally represented in each subject.
The proportion of the total number of dyslexic students in each subject. This was to examine whether there were particular subjects that dyslexic students were choosing or avoiding.

Representation of students across subject areas:

The course area with the largest percentage of dyslexic undergraduates compared to non-dyslexic undergraduates was "Creative Arts and Design" (5.59%) followed closely by "Agriculture and related subjects (5.23%) (see figure 1). However because of the number of students in the Creative Arts and Design category this dominates the figures. This corroborates many people’s comments from the DIS-Forum who felt that there was a much higher of proportion of dyslexic students in art courses compared to other areas.

But it was interesting to note that on a course by course basis "Ceramics & Glass" (17.21%) followed by "Maritime Technology" (7.93%) had the highest percentage of dyslexic students. But both these courses have a small number of students enrolled on them and so don’t show up in the subject area data.

At the other end of the scale there were a number of subject areas with very low proportions of dyslexic students. These areas tended to be those that were language based (Languages, 0.88%) or required very high academic standard to get a place (Law, 0.98%; Medicine & Dentistry, 0.87%).

This variability across subject areas was not seen in the data for other types of disability so this indicated that this variation is specific to dyslexia.

Graph showing total number of undergraduate students and number of dyslexic undergraduate students by subject area.

Figure 1: Graph showing total number of students and number of dyslexic undergraduate students by subject area. Ordered from left to right by descending number of dyslexic students.

We then looked at the proportion of dyslexic students found in each subject area. Although this gave similar results to our previous graph there were a number of differences as these figures were related to the number of students on each course. Subjects with particularly high proportion of dyslexic students were "Design Studies", "Computing Science" and "Nursing" (with 5.9% of dyslexic students). This sort of information will help us identify resources which may be useful to these high numbers of dyslexic students. We also noticed a bias towards more practical based subjects (such as "Land Management" and "Social Work") and applied sciences (such as "Computing" and "Material sciences").

Postgraduate Students:

Figure 2 shows the same data as figure 1 except for post graduate students. We have made the two axes proportionally the same scale as in figure 1 to illustrate the reduced proportion of post-graduate students who are stating that they are dyslexic. We found little difference in the subject areas that dyslexic students carry on to post-graduate level, with the highest ratio of non-dyslexic to dyslexic students being in the "Creative Arts and Design" and "Architecture, Building and Planning".

Figure 2: Graph showing total number of students and number of dyslexic postgraduate students by subject area. Ordered from left to right by descending number of dyslexic students.

Further Work

Having received outline data from a number of institutions we want to take this analysis one step further and see if these subject biases are found across a variety of different institutions. The results will be posted here soon.