Increasingly, students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the United States are overcoming historical barriers to accessing traditionally exclusionary higher education. These gains undoubtedly represent a hard-fought victory for the broader disability rights movement. However, this advance has not come through enforcing the civil rights and non-discrimination statutes that generated disability rights victories in other areas or the disability-specific education laws that promoted access to primary and secondary schooling. Instead, many students with ID are accessing higher education opportunities through specialised programmes, often styled as ‘inclusive’ despite their segregated nature. Such programmes present new arenas for familiar forms of disability-based discrimination to once more manifest — such as suspect admissions criteria, second-class status and biased disciplinary procedures. Thus, despite the proliferation of inclusive post-secondary programmes, there remains an urgent social need to address barriers to full and effective participation in higher education that students with ID continue to face when navigating university and college campuses.