Academically Included, Professionally Excluded: The Illusion of Inclusion in Computing Education

Current practices in computing education for accommodating neurodivergent students, while well-intentioned, often remove students from the very collaborative activities they will encounter in the profession. By doing so, these practices disadvantage both neurodivergent students, who graduate without practicing collaborative experiences the profession expects, and their neurotypical peers, who lose the opportunity to learn how to work across neurotypes. This results in students being academically included while remaining professionally excluded . In this opinion piece, we argue that this gap reflects accommodation defaulting to the path of least administrative resistance, rather than to design choices that scaffold participation. Treating neurodiversity as a design challenge for inclusion, rather than as a compliance problem, would change what students experience in our classrooms; and, in time, what they encounter in the profession.