As a teacher, what can you do to encourage students in special ed to continue on to college?

By planting a seed, getting a student to go to college can be easy (but I have a rather warped sense of the word easy).  But if you prepare them for college-level thinking, they may start believing in themselves.

But the most important part of my solution is finding out where the student's niche is.  Once you do this, you can help give them self-confidence and use that activity to train them how to do college courses.  Because there is PSEO (Post Secondary Enrollment Option) in Minnesota, I would encourage a student who I believe would benefit from college course.  I would advise them to take a study skills course, which I took my first year and semester of PSEO, and it was a really easy and sort of interesting class.  By showing the student that they can pass this class (Which is a college class), it may just give the student confidence in thinking that "Oh, wow, I can do this college thing."

So planting the seed will be different for each student, for some students it may be the PSEO option, for others, it may be something like the STEP program, or AP program.  Any number of things can be done to encourage and help the student recognize that they can do that terrifying thing that they call college.