Succeeding in College
Getting into college is one milestone; succeeding once there is another. For dyslexic students, college success requires active engagement with the support systems available, deliberate course load management, and a toolkit of strategies that compensate for the reading speed and processing challenges that don’t disappear after high school. Students who approach college proactively rather than hoping their difficulties will resolve themselves are far more likely to flourish.
Register with the Disability Services Office Immediately
The first and most important practical step is registering with the college’s disability services office before classes begin — ideally during the summer before freshman year. Accommodations are not automatically provided; they must be formally requested, documentation must be submitted, and paperwork must be processed. This takes time, and students who wait until they are already struggling in their first semester are trying to navigate bureaucracy while also managing coursework, new social environments, and a more demanding academic workload than they have previously encountered.
Registration entitles the student to accommodations. The most critical for dyslexic students are:
- Extended time on exams (typically 1.5x or 2x standard time)
- Access to digital texts and audiobooks for course readings
- Text-to-speech software for reading intensive material
- Note-taking assistance (a note-taker in class, or access to recordings)
- Quiet, reduced-distraction testing rooms
- Extended time on written assignments in some cases
Course Load Management
One of the most important adjustments for dyslexic college students is managing the course load realistically. The standard advice for students with significant reading difficulties is to take no more than two reading-intensive courses per semester. A reading-intensive course is one where the primary work is dense academic reading — literature, history, law, political theory, philosophy.
This is not about reducing academic challenge; it is about maintaining a workload that can actually be completed to a high standard. A student who takes four reading-heavy courses simultaneously may be unable to keep pace with the reading requirements of any of them and ends up performing poorly across the board. Strategic course selection — balancing reading-heavy courses with courses that assess students through problem sets, lab work, projects, or discussion — allows the student to manage reading demands while making full academic progress.
Students should also allow extra time for reading assignments in their schedule planning. A dyslexic student who reads at half the speed of a typical peer needs to allocate double the time for every reading assignment. Failing to account for this in time management leads to chronic behind-ness and mounting anxiety.
Assistive Technology
Text-to-speech technology is perhaps the most transformative accommodation for dyslexic college students. Rather than struggling through lengthy academic readings word by word, a student can listen while following along with the text, absorbing material at a much faster rate. Tools for accessing digital text include:
- Learning Ally: an audiobook library specifically designed for students with reading disabilities, with human-narrated recordings of thousands of textbooks
- Bookshare: a large digital library of accessible books for students with print disabilities, compatible with screen readers and text-to-speech software
- Kurzweil 3000 and Read&Write Gold: software that overlays text-to-speech on PDFs, websites, and documents, allows annotation, and supports study skills
The SQ3R Strategy for Academic Reading
SQ3R is a structured active reading strategy particularly useful for dyslexic students working with academic texts. The five steps are:
- Survey: Before reading, skim the chapter — headings, subheadings, bolded terms, figures, and the summary if one exists. Build a mental framework of what the chapter contains.
- Question: Turn each heading into a question. “The Phonological Model” becomes “What is the phonological model?” This gives the reading a purpose and a target.
- Read: Read the section actively, looking for the answer to your question.
- Recite: After each section, close the text and state the answer in your own words. This consolidates the information into memory.
- Review: At the end of the chapter, review all the questions and answers. Identify gaps and re-read to fill them.
SQ3R transforms passive reading into active processing, improves comprehension and retention, and reduces the wasted effort of reading words without registering their meaning — a common experience for students who are working too hard on decoding to have capacity for comprehension.
Based on “Overcoming Dyslexia” by Sally Shaywitz, M.D. (2020 edition)