The purpose of this study was to understand the psychological adaption of college students with disabilities. First, the differences of psychological adaption between the college students with and without disabilities were examined. Then, we explored the differences of psychological adaptation of disabled college students by demographic variables.

The size of this study’s research sample was 1,407 undergraduate students recruited from 75 universities and institutes. 688 (48.9%) of the participants were male and 719 (51.5%) were female. There were 715 (50.8%) disabled students and 692 (19.2%) regular students. Areas of disability included intellectual disabilities, visual impairments, hearing impairments, communication disorders, physical impairments, cerebral palsy, health impairments, learning disabilities, severe emotional disorders, severe and multiple impairments, Autism, and other disabilities. All participants completed a demographic information sheet and the College Students' Psychological Adaptation Scale. The scale is a five-point Likert-type self-rating scale measuring six adaptations: problem solving and decision making, family and interpersonal relationships, self-confidence and competence, learning adaptation, emotional adaptation, and value judgment.

Data analysis showed that the regular students scored higher in each index of adaptation than did students with disabilities (the effects of demographic variables were excluded). However, the patterns of the differences among the six indexes of the students with and without disabilities were similar. For students with disabilities, there were some significant differences by gender in psychological adaptation. Also, the scores of students with visible disabilities were higher than those of comparable students with invisible disabilities.

The results indicate that developing well-designed instruments to identify the needs of college disabled students, conducting more studies to explore life experiences of college students with different areas of disabilities, and developing support programs to enable and empower these students in the college campus should also be provided in the future.