Academic aspirations versus institutional realities: evaluating major selection and structural barriers for students with disabilities

Despite advances in inclusive education policies, students with disabilities still face systemic exclusion within higher education systems. Although overall enrollment rates have increased, a significant empirical gap remains regarding how institutional rigidities limit degree congruence-defined in this study as the direct alignment between a student's intrinsic academic goals and the specific program pathways available to them. Rooted in educational equity frameworks, this descriptive-analytical study examines academic interests, degree congruence, and structural barriers among a purposive sample of secondary and postsecondary students with disabilities in Saudi Arabia (N = 398). Data analysis used non-parametric inferential statistics (Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis H tests). The findings challenge the idea that academic misalignment results from changing student preferences; instead, academic aspirations stayed statistically consistent across the secondary-to-postsecondary transition. However, degree congruence differed significantly depending on the type of disability, indicating that current institutional tracking systems disproportionately marginalize students with certain impairments. Additionally, secondary students perceived informational and structural barriers much more strongly than actively enrolled university students, revealing severe transitional challenges and anticipatory anxiety. The study concludes that inflexible institutional frameworks, rather than student-level issues, are the main cause of academic misalignment, underscoring an urgent need to shift from specialized, segregated tracking toward universally accessible academic pathways.