6 School Selection Tips For LGBTQ+ College Applicants

October 03, 2024 :: Admissionado

Your kid has come out to you as queer or trans.

First of all, great job creating a safe space where they feel they can express themself to you! Now they’re applying to college, and you want to make sure they’re safe, supported, and have space to explore their identity. How can you make sure your child’s LGBTQ+ identity will be celebrated on campus?

Here are 6 school selection tips for LGBTQ+ college students and their parents. Even if one of more of these items isn’t directly tied to your child’s specific identity, they can be helpful indicators of LGBTQ+ inclusivity at a given school. Look for colleges with:

1. LGBTQ+ student organizations and events
2. Campus-sponsored LGBTQ+ resources
3. Housing and bathrooms as safe spaces
4. Adequate student health services
5. Inclusive institutional policies
6. Queer Coursework & Out Faculty

1. Student organizations and events

Student groups are essential sources of support. They build community on campus, create safe spaces, and give students a platform devoted solely to issues concerning their queer and trans identities. For students just coming out or those who have been out for years, spaces where they feel understood without having to explain or justify themself are crucial for adjusting to college life.

When searching for schools, look for queer and trans student groups through Facebook and school websites and check out their activities. If you have a chance to visit campus in person, reach out directly to the student group and ask to meet with a student leader to get a first-person perspective on queer campus community and institutional support. Generally speaking, current queer students are less likely (than official admissions representatives) to sugar-coat any issues they or their community have faced on campus.

2. Campus-sponsored LGBTQ+ resources

Besides student groups, university resources that directly support the LGBTQ+ community speak to the university’s genuine commitment to queer & trans inclusion. Such initiatives take the form of community spaces, dedicated counselors, health care providers and more. University leadership has more power and resources than student groups, and can provide support from within the institution itself—a distinction that can be critical for students facing issues like discrimination, or changing their name or gender markers on educational forms.

Especially important resources are school-sponsored LGBTQ+ centers, such as the Center for LGBT Education, Outreach & Services at Ithaca College. Such spaces host professionals with integrated knowledge about queer and trans issues on and off campus, and provide physical space for community building. Brown University also hosts the Renn Mentoring Program, which pairs out faculty and staff with interested (not necessarily out!) students in a mentoring relationship.

3. Housing and bathrooms as safe spaces

Especially for TGNC (trans & gender nonconforming) applicants, look into the housing policies of schools you’re considering. Gender-inclusive or gender-neutral housing is often available for upper-class students (2nd, 3rd and 4th year) but can be harder to find for incoming freshmen. Check out Genny Beemyn’s list of schools that have gender-inclusive housing. If you have a chance to visit campus, look out for gender-neutral bathrooms. Just because you read on official school communications that the school has gender-neutral restrooms, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re widely available or readily findable.

Remember that even for queer cisgender applicants, policies for trans* inclusion—like whether students can list their chosen name and pronouns on school records—are often a helpful barometer of the broader state of queer inclusion at a school.

4. Health services

Most students receive their physical and mental healthcare on campus during college, so it’s important that those providers have training to provide competent and culturally-sensitive care to the school’s LGBTQ+ communities. Healthcare essential to LGBTQ+ youth includes sexual and reproductive healthcare, STI testing and treatment, and mental healthcare, as well as gender-affirming treatment for trans* students. Trauma and crisis response services should also be available and trained in serving LGBTQ populations. For students who will receive health insurance through their school, check out this list of colleges and universities that provide transition-related medical expenses.

We really cant stress this enough: even if you aren’t trans and/or don’t need transition-related medical or surgical care, access to these treatments is one helpful proxy to asses the quality of LGBTQ+ healthcare on campus.

5. Institutional policy

While researching a school’s official policies isn’t enough to be sure of the campus climate of LGBTQ+ inclusion, the ramifications of policies can be huge. For instance, the option to share your chosen name, gender identity, and pronouns on admissions applications and post-enrollment forms goes a loooong way in creating a smoother beginning to the college experience for many students—including those who are not cis, don’t exclusively use cis pronouns, and/or use a chosen name that differs from the one on their legal documents—rather than an experience filled with the misgendering and deadnaming that can come to feel almost inevitable to trans* folks when they are slotted into ‘official’ databases of people with legal and/or medical implications (as when matriculating to college). As of the 2023-2024 application cycle, the Common App includes ‘X’ as an option for the legal sex category (for applicants who have changed their legal sex to ‘X’), and fields to indicate your pronouns and gender identity.

Linked elsewhere above, Genny Beemyn is once again a great resource to find out about trans-inclusive policies on campuses. You can also find a list of non-discrimination policies by school on their website. Students considering religious institutions or single-gender colleges should not only look at official school policies pertaining to LGBTQ students, but speak to current LGBTQ+ students and recent alumni.

Location, location, location. If you are considering schools—especially public colleges and universities—in states with anti-LGBTQ and/or anti-DEI laws or bills, keep in mind how forthcoming legislation may change school policies while you’re in college. Some schools have already been impacted. Generally, the legislation only has direct control over public schools, although private colleges across the US—and especially those in states with anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ laws—are feeling the effects trickling down. To track anti-LGBTQ bills that may be signed into law (but haven’t yet been), the ACLU’s list is an essential resource.

6. Queer Coursework & Out Faculty

VISIBILITY is a key indicator of queer and trans friendliness on campus. Two important aspects of queer visibility on campus are 1) out faculty and 2) courses on topics like queer histories, queer literature and art, etc. and/or departments like Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. At a time when school curricula—especially at public universities in conservative states—are coming under fire for including queer studies in their course offerings, looking at course catalogs can be a helpful way to read between the lines of any official non-discrimination policies at a school.

Making sure your LGBTQ+ teen is safe at a faraway place is an essential part of helping them find a college they love and are excited for. We at Admissionado hope this blog post makes things a little clearer and easier, and we’re here with the resources to help you and your teenager navigate the application and school selection process. If you’re in search of an LGBTQ+ admissions consultant with a deep understanding of queer & trans issues on campuses, in applications & beyond, please mention it when filling out your Free Consultation form.

Additional Resources For LGBTQ+ Students And Their Parents

• Campus Pride’s School Index: another great resource to learn more LGBTQ inclusivity at schools you and your child are interested in. Search their database of 200+ colleges and universities to learn about the various ways schools support their queer and trans students.
• Lambda Legal: The nation’s oldest and largest legal organization working for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ folks and people living with HIV.
• The Trevor Project: The best source of information about and support for LGBTQ+ mental health. Their annual survey of LGBTQ+ youth mental health is the largest of its kind, and they offer free & confidential crisis counseling 24/7.
• If you plan on supporting your transgender teen through the process of changing their legal sex marker and/or legal name—and you’ve still got time before they fill out applications—consider starting that process now. A helpful overview of the process can be found on the Trans Equality website. If the changes are reflected on your teen’s driver’s license or state ID (which can only happen after first the court order and next changing their info with the social security office), they can use their updated/correct information on applications and enrollment forms. While most schools will let students update their legal name and/or sex marker if they change in the future, scrubbing the old information from the school’s records can—in practice—be next to impossible, since that information gets sent out in many directions initially, and any updates are often not pushed out as comprehensively. While we know that this absolute bureaucratic slog is about as tantalizing as a root canal, it’s really worth handling BEFORE applications, if you can. (If they’ve applied but not enrolled, it’s still really worth pushing it through the full legal process before enrollment.)

If you’re interested in 1:1 guidance as your queer or trans teen navigates the college admissions process, you can learn more about our offerings and consultants by first filling out this Free Consultation form.

Need some help with a college application? That’s what we’re here for!