When it comes to learning disabilities, minority students are often misdiagnosed.

The faces on a Bowie State University (BSU) Web site are well known: Abraham Lincoln, Stevie Wonder, Albert Einstein, Magic Johnson and Harriet Tubman. But BSU’s Office of Disability Support Services has added the largely unknown information that they all had a disability: Lincoln was depressed; Wonder is blind; Einstein was considered retarded as a child; Johnson has attention deficit disorder; and Tubman developed epilepsy.

"It's the most successful group of 'disabled' people you could ever imagine,” says BSU’s coordinator of disability support services, Mike Hughes. “I deliberately put them there because the most important part of my job is creating an atmosphere of acceptance.”

According to the Advocacy Institute, a nonprofit that works to develop products, projects and services that improve the lives of people with disabilities at the college level, approximately 7 to 8 percent of all students have some sort of disability, with specific learning disabilities (LDs) such as ADHD, dyslexia or dysgraphia, making up slightly more than half — 50.5 percent — of those conditions.

“The people who have the hardest time being accepted, or sometimes accepting themselves, are people with learning disabilities,” Hughes says.

Experts say that often minority children go undiagnosed as their parents fear their children will be stigmatized.

“On both HBCU and White campuses, many Black and Latino students with learning disabilities never get any help,” says Thomas Mays, manager of disability services for Prince George’s Community College in Maryland. “Many are never diagnosed, and many of those who were identified as having LDs in grammar or high school had such a terrible time in special education that they never want to be identified in college even though they could really benefit from our services.”

According to Dr. Wanda J. Blanchett, associate dean for teacher education and outreach in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver: “Black students are … 2.41 times more likely than White students to be identified as having mental retardation; 1.13 times more likely to be labeled as learning disabled; and 1.68 times as likely to be found to have an emotional or behavioral disorder.”