Elite U.S. universities are supposed to educate the best and brightest. But, if smart, ambitious young people know how to do anything, it’s how to exploit a loophole, and they’re apparently doing just that in unimaginable numbers.
That’s the takeaway from a recent bombshell report in the Atlantic, wherein reporter Rose Horowitch reveals a shocking surge in accommodations for “disabilities” among students at elite colleges and universities. According to this report, Brown University and Harvard University have more than 20% of their student body registering as disabled. At Amherst College and Stanford University, the percentages are 34% and 38%, respectively.
Did we all just miss some mass-disabling event that left huge swaths of Gen Z confined to wheelchairs or without hearing? Nope.
“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one anonymous professor told The Atlantic. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”
How did this happen? Well, there’s been a tremendous expansion in what constitutes a disability. Of course, everyone agrees that reasonable accommodations should be made for people with true disabilities that hinder their education. Yet many of these students qualify as disabled for simply being diagnosed with anxiety or depression. And a significant chunk of students who receive diagnoses for real learning disabilities, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, are likely also gaming the system.
This is absurd. Having anxiety or depression can be a serious mental health issue, but it is not a disability in any sense that should require special treatment. Yet in many cases, students with these dubious disability diagnoses can get extra time on tests and other added advantages. How is that fair? And isn’t performance under time constraints part of what the tests are supposed to be measuring?
It seems intuitive that completing tests such as the LSAT, the standardized test for law school admissions, in a certain amount of time is either important for measuring your law school aptitude or it isn’t. The fact that many “disabled” students receive 50% extra or even double time on the LSAT makes no sense. Either measuring performance under time constraints is important for being a lawyer, in which case you should test all students under those constraints, or it isn’t, and all students should get the extra time. There may be some edge cases where such extensions could be truly appropriate, but they’ve clearly gone much too far.
The Atlantic reported that at one law school, 45% of students receive accommodations for supposed disabilities. That’s right, nearly half of the student body!
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This is an outrage. It also does these students a massive disservice, as whether their disability is real or not, there won’t be double time granted on deadlines at the Big Law firm they end up at, or in any other elite industry. You can’t effectively prepare students for the real world if you’re frivolously giving them advantages they’ll never get in the real world. And it all serves to insult those students who are truly disabled and undermine their ability to get the accommodations they actually do need.
Our universities have long been a shining example of American exceptionalism. But the rise of fake disabilities and a culture of victimhood, among many other problems, threatens to turn our system of higher education into an international laughing stock.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
