Three Things AHEAD 2026 Made Impossible to Ignore
What disability services offices have learned about helping students follow through, and the question it points to.
We spent three days at AHEAD 2026 in Providence, talking with the people who run disability services and inclusive higher education programs across the country, and sitting in on sessions led by practitioners who live this work. I went to listen. Three things came up again and again, and I have not stopped thinking about them.
Three things I can't stop thinking about
1. More neurodivergent students are arriving, and too many are not making it past year one.
Institution after institution described the same two trends at once: a steady increase in neurodivergent students, and a rising number who do not make it through. A growing share identify as both autistic and ADHD, and the first year is where the pressure concentrates. The shift to independence, the loss of external structure, and new social and academic expectations all arrive at once. Add the quieter costs the sessions named, higher anxiety, depression, and the fatigue of masking to appear "fine," and it is easy to see why persistence suffers. These are capable, determined students. What is missing is a support model built for how they actually learn and live.
2. Today's accommodations were not built for the core issue.
Our systems are designed to provide access: accommodations, legal compliance, academic adjustments, assistive technology. But as one session put it plainly, access does not equal implementation. A common accommodation like extended time does not address the underlying challenge; it moves the goalpost further out. The real challenge for many neurodivergent students is executive function: starting a task, planning it, tracking deadlines, and following through in the moment. Nearly every accommodation quietly depends on a student's own executive function to request it, track it, and use it consistently.
The field is converging on this
The frameworks are catching up. The newest version of the Universal Design for Learning framework now treats executive function as central to what it calls learner agency, the capacity of students to make choices in service of their own goals. As one presenter put it, that agency cannot happen consistently without executive function skills. The takeaway is simple: support the underlying capacity, not just the paperwork around it.
3. Very few institutions have a team dedicated to this population.
Given the first two points, this was the hardest to sit with. Students are arriving in greater numbers and struggling in greater numbers, and yet almost no institution I spoke with has a team built specifically to support them. The work usually falls to a disability services office that is already stretched thin, layered on top of everything else it carries, and dependent on students to self-initiate before any help begins.
The through-line
None of this is a knock on the field. The people doing this work care deeply, and they are doing a lot with very little. Across all three points, the same root keeps surfacing: the support students are offered depends on the very skill they are still building.
The short version
It is the reason we build Lunabeam the way we do: focused on executive function, built specifically for neurodivergent students and the programs that support them, and designed to extend a team rather than add to its load. The goal is not access for its own sake. It is helping students move from access to thriving.
Observations draw on conversations at our booth and on sessions at AHEAD 2026, Providence, RI.
