National Technical Institute For The Deaf - History

History

The Institute was established in 1965 by the passage of Public Law 89-36. The law also established a National Advisory Group to find a suitable site for the school. The Advisory Group considered proposals from Illinois State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Southern California, the State University of New York, the University of Colorado at Boulder and others before deciding on RIT as its home in 1966. Three factors helped RIT secure the responsibility for the new Institute:

• RIT had just moved to a new campus, so the Institute would not find itself in second-hand quarters.
• Rochester businessmen had enlightened views about disability in the workplace and were eager to share those views with the Advisory Group.
• RIT had had a trustee, Edmund Lyon, who had served as President of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and as trustee of the Rochester School for the Deaf.

The Institute was originally conceived as tuition-free, providing technical training as well as academic and communication skills training to 600 students annually.

NTID admitted its first students in 1968. Its establishment initially caused a great deal of friction on campus between hearing students and deaf students and RIT faculty and NTID faculty, the points of contention centering around the construction of new buildings for NTID, whether or not NTID faculty salaries were more generous than those of their peers, and communication differences between American Sign Language and American English.

In the early 1980s, NTID's enrollment spiked as deaf students from the "rubella bulge" of the mid-1960s entered their college years. Enrollment has been trending higher again in recent years; NTID's 2008 enrollment was its highest ever at 1,450, easily surpassing the previous record of 1,358 set in 1984.

In 1993, NTID established its Center for Arts and Sciences to help boost the numbers of undecided (or underprepared) students who stay on to pursue a baccalaureate degree. By 2005, this program had raised the proportion of NTID students in bachelor's degree programs to 41% (from 12% twenty years earlier).