I saw this going viral from Reason, “Why Are 38 Percent of Stanford Students Saying They’re Disabled?” This follows an even more viral article from The Atlantic, “Accommodation Nation,” by Rose Horowitch, who broke the story. I have never seen anything this viral in a long time, even eclipsing major AI product rollouts, for a change.
In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that’s 34 percent. At Stanford University, it’s a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
I agree that accommodations have spiraled out of control. As many in the comments sections have noted, incentives matter: It’s not surprising if the criteria for what constitutes a disability is widened, that this will be exploited. A school is much more likely to get in trouble, such as lawsuits or bad press, for denying accommodations, than being too accommodating. But given how even elite-college students are apparently abusing this privilege, the issue is not just a lack of preparedness, but the system being exploited.
This also possibly reflects poorly on student preparedness, related to equally viral articles at around the same time about college students needing remedial math. But it’s widely understood that denying someone, however ill-prepared, the opportunity to attend college effectively bars them from any real shot at entering the middle class.
In spite of the instance otherwise, many employers will not even consider applicants who do not have degrees. And despite recent stories or trends of the college wage premium shrinking, it’s still quite wide, and college grads still stand to earn much more than non-grads over a lifetime, even after controlling for inflation and tuition. Just blaming students or the institutions overlooks the wider societal forces that have turned college into a necessity. Employers who impose degree requirements on jobs that don’t genuinely demand them, share in that responsibility.
The obvious answer, as mentioned by The Atlantic, is to revert the scope of the ADA to the original SCOTUS intent. Or to punish schools that engage in ‘accommodation inflation,’ like withholding federal funding or loss of accreditation. This would require federally-mandated standards to ensure only vital or minimal accommodations are made, however that is defined, and that this is enforced for every college. There is also the impracticality of having to prove that some individuals who were accommodated were not actually deserving of it. Moreover, accommodations for non-physical disabilities predate the 2008 changes. I recall some of my classmates getting accommodations for extra time despite not being disabled in any obvious way, and this was before 2008.
But another perspective is, why does this matter? Reason’s slogan is “Free Minds and Free Markets.” If private colleges seek to increase earnings and improve customer satisfaction by expanding accommodations, isn’t this entirely consistent with the free market? Much like how companies have employee perks, there is nothing to stop private universities from offering accommodations above and beyond beyond what is required of the ADA or at their own discretion.
People like to act as if college is some sanctified or consecrated institution where the usual rules do not apply, but at its core, college is a business. Given the fungibility of degrees for non-elite colleges, middling private colleges that fail to provide enough accommodations stand to lose business to colleges that are more generous. Also, isn’t providing accommodations also consistent with the free market in terms of ‘maximizing customer value,’ especially given how much tuition has surged?
Regarding the the common claim that “excessive accommodations leave students unprepared for the real world” this mostly holds for jobs that don’t require a college degree. The irony is that jobs that require the least amount of credentials have the fewest accommodations. College, and school in general, has far fewer accommodations and flexibility than seen in most work environments, save for low-skilled jobs, where punctuality and 100% correctness are necessary, like making an order at a restaurant to the customer’s exact specifications or ringing up an order and giving exact change.
How many white-collar employees have not requested extra time for projects. How often are there project delays? All the time. People get sick, or kids get sick, family emergencies…whatever. There is even a law named after it, Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.” Or Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The largest and most successful of companies such as Google and Meta observed that flexibility and generous office perks are a positive. Strict deadlines are infeasible as work becomes more complex.
Many of those same white-collar employees who are in agreement with The Atlantic or Reason would be livid if held to the same standards they expect from students. Or journalists who write those pieces. How often do journalists request extra time for assignments? Or turn in stuff late? To be consistent on the issue, companies would not be allowed to offer any perks beyond some bare minimum and as stipulated by the pre-2008 ADA. For example, in the case of Google, employees who need special ‘quiet rooms’ due to ‘easy distractibility’ (a common symptom of ADD) would be denied them if held to the same standards as students.
In conclusion, while I agree that accommodations have gotten out of control due to the system being abused versus its original intent. The most obvious solution is to revert the 2008 changes to the ADA. But at the same time, it reeks of hypocrisy for people whose jobs have tons of accommodations to complain when students also avail them themselves of accommodations.