Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because

> Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.

I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).

I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this.

As I grew up in the 80s, there were two kinds of gifted kids in school: The kind that would ace everything anyway, and the kind that, for a variety of reasons, lacked the regulation abilities to manage the school setting well, with the slow classes and such. A lot of very smart people just failed academically, because the system didn't work for them. Some of those improved their executive function enough as they went past their teenage years, and are now making a lot of money in difficult fields.

So what happens when we do make accomodations to them? That their peaky, gifted performance comes out, they don't get ejected by the school systems anywhere near as often as they were before, and now end up in top institutions. Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.

you can even see this in tech workplaces: The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual, but it's not as if tech hires them out of compassion, but because there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway. So it should be no surprise that in instutitutions searching for performance, the number of people that qualify for affordances for certain mental disabilities just goes way up.

That's not to say that there cannot be people that are just cheating, but it doesn't take much time in a class with gifted kids to realize that no, it's not just cheating. You can find someone, say, suffering in a dialectic-centric english class, where just following the conversation is a problem, while they are outright bored with the highest difficulty technical AP classes available, because they find them very easy.

That doesn't seem outrageously high for a high cap school?

15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.

Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.

Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.

We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.

Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?

FWIW a lot of the disability disclosure instructions for statistical purposes say stuff like "ever had cancer" and other qualifications that I find curious (because they don't really seems to be truly indicative of having a disability or not). (Not that it has anything to do with the main point of the article. Even in K12 a certain type of affluent family makes services into a game.)

I go to one of those elite universities now, and I get academic accommodations. I think some of the increase is truly from greater awareness about disabilities among teachers and parents. My mom was a teacher, and she was the one who first suspected that I had dyslexia. I repeated kindergarten, and I was privileged that my parents were able to afford external educational psychology testing. Socioeconomic status is a large part of my success. Even seemingly small things like the fact that my parents could pick me up after school so that I could go to tutoring was something that other kids didn’t have, because their parents were working or didn’t have a car.

The whole thrust of the article is complaining about timed tests and some kids getting more time. That's doubtless unfair if some are overclaiming, but the real solution is to not do timed tests at all - they are only serving to produce an arbitrary bell curve so that some can have higher grades and get better career opportunities. Better to not have a timer at all, and let people's actual ability shine.

American society is at the point where if you don't play these sort of games/tricks, you'll get out-competed by those who do. Bleak.

I don't know about Stanford students' actual disability, so I can't say much to that. I went to shitty high school and decent middle school in relatively poor middle class neighborhood. Now, I live in a wealthy school district. The way parents in the two different neighborhood treat "learning disability" is mind blowing.

In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.

In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11903426-show-me-the-incentive-and-i-ll-show-you-the-outcome

It's funny how upset most comments are with the realization that a lot more people are disabled while most of the users in HN are probably on the spectrum

> the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.

Isn't that... good? What else would be expected if you have a disability, and need accomodations?

If 38% of the top 1% of students have learning disabilities then I'd expect students near the mean to be 100% learning disabled, if those words have any meaning left.

Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education.

So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highly selective school that’s by definition going to be picking gifted kids over less gifted ones, and from that group will pick those that were accommodated appropriately.

(There could also be cheating - I don’t know either way. I’m just commenting on the premise of the article. One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious that this claim is totally illogical. Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.)

I have a teenager who is at an academically rigorous college prep school. He is incredibly bright and one of the best students in the school. But he has an accommodation in math for extra time because he has a form of dyscalculia which makes him very prone to misreading and mixing up in working memory the numbers, symbols and other formulas. He understands all the concepts well, but his disability results in calculation/mechanical errors unless he has the extra time to check his work multiple times for these errors. I believe this kind of disability and accommodation is legitimate, but I understand why others may disagree. He even says he often feels guilty for getting extra time when others don't. I am sure there are also people who abuse the system and get accommodations when then don't actually need them.

The fact that this shows higher numbers than the community college kids ("...have far lower rates of disabled students...") is interesting too. Yeah, one can argue that Stanford maybe is just so accommodating that it just serves as a great attractor for people with disability. I somehow doubt that.

I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of some coaching program too. It seems too random for folks to just "stumble" on a hack. There are few of these outfits which advertise that they can "get your kid accepted into colleges" if you buy their services.

> But the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.

If we take honesty out of the equation, what's the downside for not declaring a disability, if it's not that hard to get a note from a doctor? You get better housing, and more time on tests. I am surprised the number is not higher, actually like 75% or something.

Does this number include housing accommodations? They are provided through the same disability office. I have dry eye disease, and when the relative humidity was 19% in my dorm room I requested an accommodation to have a humidifier. I’m sure that type of accommodation wouldn’t have been approved in the past.

> "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Talented students get to college, start struggling, and run for a diagnosis to avoid bad grades.

Okay, I was an undergrad at Stanford a decade ago, I graduated with two majors (math, physics) and almost another minor (CS) so I took more credits than most and sat in more tests than most, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single person given extra time on tests; and some of the courses had more than a hundred people in them, with test takers almost filling the auditorium in Hewlett Teaching Center if memory serves. Article says the stat “has grown at a breathtaking pace” “over the past decade and half” and uses “at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” as a shocking example, so I would assume the stat was at least ~10% at Stanford a decade ago. So where were these people during my time? Only in humanities? Anyone got first hand experience?

This focuses on students seeking diagnoses. But I would expect most of them have already been diagnosed long before college. Parents with high expectations of their children are more likely to seek diagnoses. If you've spent your childhood being told you are ADHD and on Ritalin, then it is natural you would self-identify as such in college.

I went to an elite school. I had undiagnosed depression and ADHD and I almost failed out.

I don't think I needed more time on tests but I definitely needed medication and counseling. The counseling resources available at the time were not adequate and medication was difficult to get.

I'm mostly a law professor these days. When final-exam time rolls around (as in, this week), I raise my eyebrows when I'm sent the list of students who get 50% extra time. I wouldn't presume to judge the propriety of any given student's accommodation. But many of the accommodated students seem to have done just fine in class discussions during the semester.

FTA: "Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth."

I have a sneaking suspicion that a surprising number of these disabilities require treatment with performance-enhancing drugs.

Timed tests encourage wrote memorization and reflexive knowledge. They don't encourage what is reflective of the modern real world knowledge recollection. In almost all scenarios, you have a book to reference for knowledge, much less search engines (and now LLMs). Almost nothing is memorized today, in the work world. What you know, in my experience, comes from frequent usage. Your timespan to work on most things is on the order of days, not minutes or an hour.

Tests should be open book, open notes, and an extensive amount of time to do the test. The questions should be such that they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not just how well you can parrot back information.

Whilst I would love tests to be open internet, this lends itself to very easy cheating. The material being taught and what notes you take about it should be enough to answer any questions posed to you about the material. Especially those that demonstrate an understanding of the material.

> The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities.

What the actual... Lack of journalistic integrity rears its head once again. Executive function and social challenges do not make a person "not smart."

Going back to the core of the problem, I feel that this does need to be controlled. It's one thing to disability signal online to gain clout, it's a completely different thing to drain resources from genuinely disabled folks. Disabilities need to come with diagnoses.

> The result is a deeply distorted view of "normal." If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD > risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class

OP has likely never had a kid with ADHD (I get it, they're like 24), getting a kid to be ADHD diagnosed is neither fun nor something you would do lightly in the US.

Which is also why older millennials would just not get diagnosed and just struggle more. Tech is full high functioning people with ADHD and autism, it's not surprising you'd see so many students at Stanford being the same.

With rates that high, it's a disadvantage if you don't have specialists assess your kid for all the things that could qualify them for extra testing time if you have the money to do it.

My experience backs up that this is increasing even on the last decade. I worry that it’s yet another hack that the $8000 admissions consultants offer to their clients, potentially pointing (yet again) to a version of DEI that doesn’t mostly amplify privilege.

Is that something a Stanford student would want on their permanent record? Employers or the government might be able to obtain that information. You could be flagged for life as a reject.

Under the Trump administration, accommodations for mentally disabled people are no longer enforced. Most of the enforcers were laid off. The new policy is “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” [1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...

For pete's sake just give everyone extra time on tests; what's the big deal?

If you know the stuff, regurgitating it faster is a trivial optimization.

People respond to incentives. Give disabled people advantages and you get more disabled people.

Oh and the fact that in USofA, Big Pharma in cahoots with corrupt doctors and a broken police/judicial system let you legal amphetamines if you have adhd is, of course, nothing to do with this.

Not intending to offend, but aren't exceptionally gifted students (i.e. outliers) by definition neuro-divergent? Disclaimer: I am neuro-divergent, but not exceptionally gifted.

Why wouldn’t they, if it gives them some advantage?

Having a mental disability is chic for kids right now. You won't find a discord or other online profile of a kid with less than three mental disabilities listed. For better or worse, they use them to connect with one another, have something in common. It doesn't help either that these disabilities are super easy to misdiagnose with dishonest patients which means lots of real drugs are flowing to children with fake problems.

This is all aside from the fact that these disabilities can be used as a way to get all sorts of special treatment. That's just icing on the cake. They see each other doing it and say why not me as well. It's a feign mental disorder chain reaction that's gone critical. Sexuality as well. They like to collect labels like Pokémon. Massive social benefit.

Why is it so hard to believe that disabled people can be accepted into "elite" universities? I think the article author, and many of the commenters here, are conflating "normalised behaviours" with "intelligence". As a society we have normalised pushing students into being able to complete assessments within an allotted time frame, even though the time it takes to finish an assessment isn't a perfect measure of one's intelligence (regardless of whether or not the answers were factually correct/incorrect). We have normalised allowing people who are "articulate" to take up space in society because we have collectively decided that articulate people are more intelligent, even though that isn't inherantly true.

I don't doubt that many of those students are faking having a disability to game the system in order to benefit themselves, but this article and the discussion around it are anything but intellectual.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior"

  - Charlie Munger

Reminds me of the Asymptomatic Tourette's video https://youtu.be/H9X3GkacXG8

This is super common in affluent school districts. Bulldozer parents with lots of time and resources eventually get their kid some diagnosis that confers benefits in their schooling. Be it additional time on assignments, one on one tutoring, or whatever. They carry these diagnoses, habits, and expectations to college.

To be clear I am not making light of or dismissing legitimate issues. Simply pointing out that there are some that take advantage of the systems that exist.

You actually are starting to see this in the corporate world. People with a laundry list of diagnoses and other statuses that make them very tricky to let go for performance reasons.

Accommodating for disability is cheesing the test score. Cheesing a test score is cheesing the metric. Cheesing the metric is always some form of lying, usually to yourself.

- You're lying to yourself about how good of a fit your are for the program.

- The professor/administration is getting inaccurate data about the teaching efficacy.

If you want to know if you can be a civil engineer despite your disability, the last thing you should do is correct for the disability in your primary success metric.

Whether I care depends on the accommodation they're seeking.

When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.

That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.

It's like when all the prisoners in Orange is the new Black start to claim they are Jewish in order to get the nicer Kosher meals from the cafeteria.

Incentives. Did you know that mental health specialists like therapists as a field are entirely in lock-step in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything, because otherwise most insurance won't reimburse?

Any functioning individual can go to a therapist and get an immediate diagnosis of an affliction, simply because therapists won't get clients if they don't provide the avenue for being funded by health insurance.

It actually makes sense that the smartest people in our society would be disabled, right?

Isn't it strategic at this point? Why not use the "disabled" card if it'll get you better results for similar cost?

This is a really poor article that has no research behind it, and no attempt to investigate anything or talk to anyone with a different view. The only source is the terrible Atlantic article about the topic.

There’s plenty to discuss and disagree with these policies but the author’s willingness to make broad judgments about college students’ behaviors and internal states based on poor understanding of ADHD, the ADA, and what’s actually going on at these schools is incredibly poor journalism by this author and by Reason.

>the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note.

Stanford can make the student pay any costs of the accommodation if Stanford wants to push back on the student. E.g., if the student requests extra time on tests, Stanford can estimate the total cost of employing the proctor and bill that (amortized of course over the amount of extra time).

But yeah, it is kind of excessive how much special treatment a person can get in US society just by being rich enough to afford a doctor who will sign whatever letters the person needs (and being shameless enough to request the letters). Another example is apartment buildings with a strict policy of no dogs. With a doctor's letter, the pet dog becomes a medically-necessary emotional-support animal, which the landlord must allow per the same ADA discussed in the OP.

I was literally reading the same stuff happening in Norway and two young women at the university spoke up about it. The main issue there was the abuse of doctors time lying about issues to get extra time on the exams as the extra time requires a doctor's note.

Related:

Accommodation Nation: America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121559