July 8
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We often talk about how hard university is for people with ADHD. The independence, the workload, the chaos of unstructured time. What we don’t talk about enough is this:
Many never make it that far.
A recent longitudinal study from Finland followed thousands of young people from birth to their early thirties. It found something striking: adolescents with symptoms of ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) were significantly less likely to reach higher education.
Not just complete it. Reach it.
And those with both ADHD and ODD? They had the steepest drop-off of all.
The research didn’t just confirm what many of us already suspect—that ADHD makes school harder. It also shed light on how teenage behaviour becomes a fork in the road.
At 16, students with ADHD and/or ODD already had significantly lower grades than their peers. These grades, in turn, limited access to higher education. Especially in structured academic systems like Finland’s, grades are the gatekeepers. If you don’t pass through the gate, you never reach the garden.
Interestingly, girls with ODD were disproportionately likely to end their education at the compulsory level—a gender divide the study noted but couldn’t fully explain. The message is clear though: disruptive behaviour in girls isn’t just overlooked—it may be punished in quieter, more lasting ways.
Some students did get through.
Maybe they were gifted. Maybe they had hyper-supportive families. Maybe they white-knuckled their way through high school on late-night cramming and sheer panic.
Whatever the method, they cleared the threshold - but that doesn’t mean they were equipped for what came next.
Because while secondary school still provides structure, supervision, and constant feedback, university is an entirely different game.
There are lectures, but no roll call. Deadlines - but no reminders. Support - but only if you know to ask for it (and have the executive function to get there).
And so many who “should have been fine” crash hard - not because they lacked ability, but because their coping strategy was never a foundation. It was a survival tactic.
This is what the study doesn’t track - but what we know from lived experience: the problem wasn’t always grades. The problem was what the grades were hiding.
The implication is sobering: the very skills needed to succeed in higher education - planning, time management, internal motivation - are the ones least likely to be developed in students with ADHD or ODD.
And yet, that’s exactly what higher education demands.
This study showed that even before university, many students were already at a disadvantage - not because they couldn’t learn, but because the environment they were in punished how they learned.
When you add in the expectation of self-regulation at tertiary level, it’s not a mystery why so many fall off after entry. The surprise is that anyone without the right scaffolding makes it through at all.
We stop blaming individuals for outcomes that were never designed with them in mind.
We recognise that:
Academic disengagement often begins in adolescence, not adulthood.
Early intervention matters, not just to improve grades, but to scaffold motivation and executive functioning.
Access and adjustment are two separate hurdles. And right now, we're failing on both.
Success in high school doesn’t guarantee readiness for university - especially when that success was built on masking, stress, or unsustainable effort.
And maybe most importantly: we stop using higher education as the only measure of success.
Because some of the brightest minds - the ones who challenge authority, think differently, and refuse to colour inside the lines - are being filtered out before they even get a chance to bloom.
If you or someone you coach didn’t make it to university, or made it in but burned out fast, it might not be a failure.
It might be that you succeeded in spite of the system, not because of it.
And that system?
It needs to change.
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