Autism, The Cost Of Education

Education, according to autism society.org  costs more than $8,600 extra per year for a student with autism within the United States of America, when the average cost of educating a student is about $12,000.  A similar survey by Web-MD found that the cost of services and education for children with autism averages out to more than $17,000 per child each year -- with school systems footing much of the bill.  This means that the biggest expenses were outside the medical realm. "Non-health care" services averaged $14,000 per child, and special education at school accounted for more than 60% of those costs.

Autism services cost U.S. citizens $236-262 billion annually. A majority of costs in the U.S. are in adult services – $175-196 billion, compared to $61-66 billion for children. In the U.S., A person living with autism that has an intellectual disability will cost $2.4 million throughout their life span and without intellectual disability $1.4 million.

Unfortunately Autism Spectrum Disorder along with a multitude of other verbal disabilities knows no boundaries. There is not one country or race on this planet that’s void of the impact of these health issues on a certain percentage of their population.

In Ireland alone there are 11,500 peoplewho are non-verbal that have a diagnosis of A.S.D. (Autism spectrum disorder).

In the United States it is estimated that 1 in 68 births results in ASD. This means that more than 3.5 million Americans live with an autism spectrum disorder and that as many as 25% of these individuals are non-verbal, that’s over 875,000 people in America that are living with limited communication.

There are around 700,000 people in the UK living with autism - that's more than 1 in 1001. If you include their families, autism touches the lives of 2.8 million people every day and 175,000 of these People are living with non-verbal ASD.

Autism worldwide, 1% of the world’s population has autism, 25% of these people are non-verbal. There are 7 billion people in the world, this equates to 70 million people with ASD, which 17.5 million worldwide are living with non-verbal autism of some kind.