Joshua Gallaudet is a finance and operations professional whose career spans investment banking, data analytics, restructuring, and alternative asset management. Currently a consultant at PIMCO, Joshua Gallaudet leads reporting transformation and data migration initiatives across the firm’s alternatives portfolio, integrating data architecture across asset classes to support strategic decision making. He previously held roles at UBS AG, UBS Securities, Class Action Refund LLC, and Alvarez and Marsal, where he managed regulatory data systems, leveraged finance transactions, ERP integrations, and private equity reporting frameworks. He earned an MBA in finance from Vanderbilt University and a BA in American history from Trinity College. With a personal interest in the education of deaf people rooted in his family history, he brings an informed perspective to discussions about how higher education institutions serve, and often fail, deaf students.
How Higher Education Institutions Fail Deaf Students
Colleges and universities increasingly enroll deaf students, reflecting broader gains in educational attainment and access to postsecondary education for these individuals. More than 200,000 deaf students are currently enrolled in college, and over the past decade, more have earned bachelor’s degrees than ever before. Yet, increased enrollment has not translated into consistently accessible or inclusive learning environments. Across many institutions, structural, cultural, and operational shortcomings continue to limit deaf students’ full participation in higher education.
One of the most persistent challenges is the uneven provision of accommodation. While laws and regulations exist to protect the rights of deaf students, many institutions struggle to translate those requirements into reliable practice. Disability services (DS) offices are typically responsible for coordinating access, but they often operate with limited staffing, funding, and institutional authority. As a result, accommodations such as sign language interpreting, speech-to-text services, captioning, and notetaking are frequently subject to logistical delays, staffing shortages, or inconsistent quality. Students report that repeatedly advocating for these services is exhausting and diverts time and energy away from academic and social engagement.
Institutional unfamiliarity with deaf students’ needs further compounds these problems. Many colleges lack an understanding of communication barriers that extend beyond the classroom, including group work, advising, orientation, and informal campus interactions. Access is often treated as a narrow technical issue rather than a multidimensional experience involving learning environments, campus connectedness, and a deaf-affirming climate. Although most institutions provide some form of captioned media, fewer than half report that faculty consistently receive training on captioning policies, and many acknowledge that such policies are applied unevenly across campus.
Financial and administrative gaps also contribute to institutional failure. Some colleges remain unaware that financial aid, grants, and tax incentives can offset the costs of accommodations. This lack of awareness can result in underinvestment in interpreters, assistive technologies, and specialized personnel. Even when services are available, last-minute requests and scheduling conflicts frequently go unmet, particularly for speech-to-text services and interpreting. These gaps signal to students that access is contingent rather than guaranteed.
Faculty practices represent another critical barrier. Disability services professionals cite faculty resistance to accommodations, especially in testing contexts, as a recurring challenge. Limited training on inclusive course design and accessible instruction means that accommodations are often treated as exceptions rather than integrated elements of teaching. This approach places the burden on deaf students to negotiate access individually, reinforcing feelings of isolation and marginalization.
The absence of deaf professionals within disability services offices further weakens institutional capacity. National data show that deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals remain underrepresented in these roles. Those who do work in disability services often face the same access barriers as students, including meetings without interpreters or captioning and professional environments not designed with deaf staff in mind. This dynamic contributes to burnout and high turnover, depriving institutions of lived expertise that could improve service quality and institutional responsiveness.
Ultimately, higher education institutions fail deaf students not through a single omission, but through interconnected structural gaps. Inconsistent accommodation, limited faculty training, under-resourced disability services, and the marginalization of deaf professionals collectively create environments where access must be continually negotiated. These conditions undermine both academic success and campus belonging, despite the growing presence of deaf students in postsecondary education.
About Joshua Gallaudet
Joshua Gallaudet is a finance professional with experience in investment banking, regulatory compliance, restructuring, and alternative asset management. He has held leadership roles at UBS AG, UBS Securities, Class Action Refund LLC, and Alvarez and Marsal, and currently serves as a consultant at PIMCO, where he leads reporting and data initiatives across investment portfolios. He earned an MBA from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Trinity College and maintains a longstanding interest in deaf education rooted in his family history.
