About Me

The study of rehabilitation in the United States is rooted in the government’s efforts to professionalize the return-to-work services of veterans (men) with physical disabilities in the early 20th century. Vocational rehabilitation counseling has evolved into a master’s-level discipline that supports individuals with various types of disabilities and chronic health conditions, in their pursuits of employment, education, and optimal independent living. Through holistic, biopsychosocial, and culturally sensitive approaches, rehabilitation counselors collaborate with their clients and other members of their clinical teams to support them in obtaining and maintaining goals related to meaningful community engagement. This typically involves the exploration of reasonable accommodations and assistive technology.

In the 1960s, Dr. Kenneth Hylbert of Penn State University launched an experiment – a bachelor of rehabilitation degree – to meet the “vast unmet needs of certain disability groups” that other bachelor’s degree programs just weren’t designed to do. The need for rehabilitation was understood, but the workforce was insufficient. The goal of the experiment was to create a group of rehabilitation professionals that were trained at the bachelor’s-level to address this “lack of professional manpower,” with an immediacy and at a rate that graduate-level training could not provide. They were also to be trained as generalists in rehabilitation, leaving specialization for graduate study. Today, a wide variety of bachelors, masters, and doctoral programs in rehabilitation and related fields are available across the United States and the world. These include rehabilitation & human services, rehabilitation science, occupational therapy, physical therapy, mental health counseling, addiction counseling, public health, applied behavior analysis, speech-language pathology, recreational therapy, low-vision rehabilitation, and so many other disciplines.