Introduction

This chapter provides an understanding of the context in which students with disabilities experience higher education and employment using data from qualitative research. University of the Free State (UFS) is an urban university founded in 1904 as an English-speaking university for whites only. In the late 1940s, it became an Afrikaans-speaking university, but with the advent of democracy, the university shifted to parallel media of communication in 1993, offering both English and Afrikaans. Since 2010 the number of registered students with disabilities at UFS has been expanding, but they constitute less than 1% of the overall student body and thus are severely under-represented. UniVen is a historically disadvantaged rural-based university, established in 1981 during the apartheid era. It is in the Thohoyandou area in the northern province of Limpopo, established to serve the local black people and students from other African countries. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.