I think functioning should include people skills.

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It does not make sense to classify me as high functioning when I have not had a friend or job in over 10 years. People are changing and I can't seem to change with them. I may have been high functioning 10-20 years ago but I certainly am not now.

Should is the word. Functioning in Autism refers to intelligence not the ability to function in society. High functioning refers to average to above average intellegnce or an IQ above 70.

I feel a bit like this too because I'm unable to work and don't have any friends either.

Other people seem to be able to navigate different life stages without too much trouble - they just accept it. I've never been able to. I'm around your age but in many ways, mentally, I feel "stuck" at 17 or 18. The aging process is happening so quickly, and my mind is having difficulty catching up!

Regarding being more high functioning when you were younger, I felt that way as well, but I don't really think that's the case now. When you are young you're allowed to make a few social mistakes, and everyone is pretty much at the same level regarding work and relationship experience. That changes when people hit their late twenties/early thirties because they tend to settle down with a partner and/or progress in their career.

If you lack the skills needed to succeed in life, you'll find yourself way behind others once you reach 30, and it will get worse as you age. It is very difficult to catch up at that point because you've missed out on so much.

Yeah, "functional levels" really should include people skills since deficiencies in this area come at a cost.
I notice myself lacking in this aspect too. It's as though everyone is automatically smarter and more mature than I am, while I'm stuck in my mid-teens unable to distill the meaning of a spoken monologue of any length.

At a minimum it's important to be able to have a break from that feeling if it can't be otherwise overcome. I've found it much easier to make peace with feeling thick-headed than helplessly immature. It's an especially bad look for a guy.

I don’t think functioning levels are that bad... I will never think I have as many difficulties as non verbal autistics who have intellectual disabilities and are considered low functioning and mostly unable to work. However, I would like people to understand that being a high functioning autistic adult means we are only high functioning compared to other autistic people. Autism always comes with some functioning impairment, and it doesn’t matter how functional we are, we still face many significant problems that NTs don’t have, the same way a “high functioning” person with an intellectual disability shouldn’t be expected to function as well as typically developing people of the same age.

I am now 22 and about to graduate from college, but I live with my parents, have no friends and have never had a job. I will have a summer job this year and see how it goes. Everyone I know considers me to be high functioning enough to have no problems with it, but I’m really worried about getting stressed or doing things wrong. My parents, though, don’t understand my worries and insist that I’m not disabled.

Exactly. I am way lower functioning than most (In life quality) because of my developmentally inferior social skills. The fact that you are graduating at 22 proves my point. You said yourself that a “high functioning” person with an intellectual disability shouldn’t be expected to function as well as typically developing people of the same age. But you are graduating at 22 like everyone else in your age group. You have no disability based on your own definition. My dad was in the Navy so I never stayed in one place for very long, sometimes only a couple of months at a time. I was pretty "normal" until 6th grade. That is when the nonstop teasing and alienation started. This happened no matter where I was in the country, from Virginia Beach to Portland, OR. I started skipping school because of the constant bullying and the last "real" grade I passed was, in fact, the aforementioned 6th grade. I was never held back because of the constant moving to the new schools, and I got my GED when I was 17. I tried College and it was the same problem as Highschool, only now the instructors were bullying me with the students. I tried a few different Colleges as well and now I cant go to College anymore because I used up all of the available government aid. I am surviving but I am not thriving. I am isolated by my current circumstances in life. I have not worked since February 2009 and I was about to give up and live on the streets. I had no income and was living on college loans and credit cards that I am still not able to pay even to this day. Around 2012 I had a new therapist who asked me why I never applied for social security. I did not think I was eligible given that I was already denied OPWDD (Office for People with Developmental Disabilities), but he sent me for a Neuropsychological evaluation on 5/2/12. I was able to get on Social Security. I also get HEAP (Home Energy Assistance Program) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). These have kept me warm, fed, (I have actually gotten pretty fat) and off the streets but I still have trouble paying off my student loans and credit card debts that I had to live on earlier. I am still looking for work, but my spotty work history and lack of transportation severely limit my employability, not to mention most people think I am crazy or a killer. I live almost 3 miles away from the nearest bus stop. It is very dangerous walking along the roads in upstate NY, not just when it's cold but also because there is no shoulder or sidewalks on most roads and I am basically walking in the street. That may not be a problem in other parts of this country or the rest of the world. But here, so many pedestrians have been murdered by reckless drivers that we have signs all over the place saying "share the road" and there are even some roads that are off limits with signs saying "pedestrians and bicycles prohibited".

Global Area Functioning includes social skills

If you do not believe me, look it up

I’m sorry about your situation and the difficulty in getting employment where you live. I hope you find something soon.

But I don’t think you understood my point. I haven’t actually given a definition for disability in my post. The only thing I said was that functioning levels separated us from people who have significant problems communicating. I have compared ASD to ID just to prove that people with “mild ASD” are disabled, just like people with “mild ID” are disabled, even though there are people with more profound disabilities in those spectrums. I never said you could not be disabled if you had ASD and no cognitive impairment.

I consider myself to have a disability, as I have actually been diagnosed, when I was a child, and as I said, I consider ASD to always imply a degree of impairment in functioning. However, I think graduating at my age is an accomplishment that seems out of many people’s reach and I acknowledge that it means my disability is not affecting me so seriously at the moment. This will probably change as soon as I get more responsibilities, such as the full time summer job I’m going to start in June. Also, though academically I’m at the same level as most people my age, all of my classmates have jobs, and some even live independently. This is not my case, and I’m now behind my younger siblings in these aspects of development. I basically function like a young teen (14-15).

What is the goal you would hope to achieve by changing the criteria for functioning labels? Is it to get better services?
Someone who is nonverbal vs. someone who is possibly intellectually above average but socially and emotionally behind and "fails to launch" will be dealing with very different issues, and so the help they will need is quite different.

As far as how capable someone is to live the life he/she wants, that depends on a lot of things and can't be measured with some linear "scale". Sometimes I feel that other autistics who are impaired in life mainly because of intellectual difficulties but have more social awareness could make good friends or romantic partners, but on the other hand most such people are "more normal" (because finding the intellectual environment at school more challenging than the social aspect is more common) and so some see people like myself as much as "hopeless nerds" as NTs do. There's also the difference in preferred topics of conversation.

Sofisol612, you need to talk to people over 70 about their college experience. Or just read history. The baby boomer generation happened for many reasons, but one reason is education grants. While some lucky people had jobs waiting for them when they came back from WWII, many found that education grants were the only hope available to them. And so it became common for people in their 20's or even 30's to "start" College. During this time the education system noticed that these older individuals excelled in their studies (compared to teens) and the reason why is the human brain does not fully mature until the mid 20's or 30's. So the modern practice of graduating by 22 is just a result of repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning history. If you don't believe me, then just google "older students" as this is still as true today as it always has been.

Housing. If substance abusers and criminals can get it even though they made bad choices, what's the problem with changing the criteria?

Well, I hadn’t heard about that. I believe everything you said, but it doesn’t apply everywhere, at least not in my country. I live in Argentina, a country where higher education has been free for more than a century, and we don’t have such things as student grants. Furthermore, baby boomers in my country didn’t have to participate in World War II, as Argentina took no part in it. In our case, then, there was no history from which to learn.

I am one of the youngest students in my class, and some of my classmates are in their 40s, married and with children. This is not uncommon, as they can study for free and do it while they work. The older students often take less subjects per year and take more time to graduate, because they have many more responsibilities (household chores, work, children, etc.) but they usually do better at the exams than younger students, so I guess you are right about that. I know I would be very far from graduation if I had been working and living by myself the past 3 years, but that could never have happened, as I doubt I’d be able to hold down a job at the age of 18.

Absolutely, people/social-skills are a main-criteria. Defining social-skills can prove to be elusive (See 'Social Skills & Making Friends Forum') when put to words, and images; let alone defining social-skills on some narrow numerical classifications!