Preparing Neurodivergent Students for Campus Life

Picture this: A student who managed high school successfully, often with a well-established system of support, sits down to take his first college-level exam—and realizes the game has changed.

That’s a scenario that plays out repeatedly for neurodivergent students, according to Kirsten Behling, associate dean of student accessibility and academic resources at Tufts University. “At the Student Accessibility and Academic Resources (StAAR) Center, we often see students for the first time after their first exam,” Behling says. “They realize they needed resources they had before, but they don’t know how to access those resources in a college setting.”

For years, Daniel Doherty, director of pre-college programs at University College, had been noticing the gap between academic readiness and system navigation. Then, one morning on his drive to work, he heard a radio story about the impending closure of a community-based program designed to help neurodivergent students prepare for life after high school.

“That was the final push,” Doherty says. “It made me think, this is an area where we can do something.”

The result is College Prep 101 for Neurodivergent Students, a new Tufts pre-college program designed for high schoolers and their families. Offered through University College, the program aims to help students understand college-level expectations and navigate academic and campus life with confidence.

Making College Make Sense

For the purposes of the program, Doherty and Behling use the term “neurodivergent” broadly, as a non-medical umbrella that reflects how many students describe themselves. Rather than centering diagnosis, the focus is on common experiences: how students manage structure, communication, transitions, and independence in complex environments—like college campuses.

Those considerations shape the structure of College Prep 101 for Neurodivergent Students. Designed as an immersive, five-day experience, the program brings a small cohort of high school students to campus during the summer, creating space for discussion, reflection, and instruction that can respond to participants’ needs in real time.

“We designed the program to slow down the transition to college and make its systems more visible,” Doherty says. “We’re hoping to give students a chance to understand how campus life works before they’re expected to navigate it on their own.”

Over the course of the week, the College Prep 101 students will sit in on classes, eat in dining halls, and talk directly with current Tufts students—including neurodivergent undergraduates—about what surprised them most when they arrived on campus. They will also participate in seminars on classroom expectations, self-advocacy, organization, success strategies, and understanding legal rights and accommodations.

Each student will develop a personalized “My College Plan”—a roadmap outlining questions to ask and strategies to try—that they can carry with them when they start out their college journeys.

“The idea is to help students see the system ahead of time and develop a concrete plan for thriving within it,” Behling says. “That way, they’re not trying to figure everything out for the first time under pressure.”

A distinctive feature of College Prep 101 is its parallel track for parents and guardians, which recognizes that the transition to college reshapes family roles as well as student responsibilities.

“For many parents, this is a huge change,” says Behling. “They’ve spent years advocating, coordinating, and reminding. Suddenly, they’re being asked to step back.” The College Prep 101 sessions that have been designed for families focus on how parents can encourage independence without intervening too quickly and on how laws pertaining to students in higher education differ from those governing K–12 education, she adds.

“A lot of the laws governing high school exist to set students up for success,” she explains. “A lot of the laws that apply to college set students up for access. Those are very different things.”

Beyond legal and academic concerns, many neurodivergent students and their families worry about adjusting to the social challenges of college, according to Behling and Doherty. “You have new daily routines, shared living spaces, and new environments,” Doherty points out. “The program’s curriculum addresses these concerns with a focus on practical guidance. College is partly about learning how to manage time, share space, navigate group projects—we want to give students confidence in their ability to do those things.”

Filling a Gap

The program builds on a broader set of initiatives at Tufts aimed at supporting neurodivergent students, including individualized accommodations through the StAAR Center and residential options such as the Neurodivergent House, which offers a calm living environment and a built-in sense of community.

College Prep 101 extends that work earlier, pairing existing supports with a philosophy of preparation rather than response.

“Most of the support structures in higher education are reactive,” Doherty explains. “Students often don’t encounter them until something goes wrong. We want this to be an earlier intervention.”

Behling situates that goal within a larger shift underway in higher education. As awareness of neurodivergence grows and stigma continues to recede, she says, colleges are seeing more students seek accommodations and support. Far less common are opportunities that help students understand how those systems work before they arrive on campus, when expectations are still abstract and the stakes are lower.

“That’s the gap,” Behling says. “By the time students reach us, they’re often already under pressure.”

Although College Prep 101 takes place at Tufts, it is not designed exclusively for students who plan to attend the university. The aim, Doherty says, is to give students a transferable framework for understanding how college systems in general operate, one they can apply wherever they ultimately enroll.

“If neurodivergent students can enter with a better sense of how college works,” he adds, “they’re in a much stronger position to focus on learning and building their lives on campus from the start.”