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).

The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...

Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.

Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.

If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.

The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.

Just training for working at McKinsey after graduation

They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage.

It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.

I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.

Follow the incentives

Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things.

The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires.

I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions.

[rant]

Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about.

[/rant]

So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you?

[0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis.

[1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased

[2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM)

[3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8

[4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say?

[5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.

I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.