alt Hacker NewsWhy are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
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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.
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.
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 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.
This sort of scamming has been going on for a long time, by rich kids particularly. I remember 20 years ago I was surprised to learn that one of my friends, a very clever guy from a very well off family, was supposedly so profoundly disabled that he could do all of his tests overnight and at home. When I asked him how he got such a sweet deal, the answer was "My dad's a doctor."
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."
New York Times had an interesting podcast recently where they talked about how so many children are being diagnosed with autism to the point where it's hurting the severely autistic student population (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/podcasts/the-daily/autism...). There's a finite set of resources pooled for special needs students, and now most of these students have relatively minor symptoms compared to those with "profound autism" (which is a severe disability associated with the inability to speak or live independently).
I suspect this is similar - rich parents are doing anything for an edge in their child's education and can get any diagnosis they desire. It's an unfair system.
> 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?
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?
I had neither healthcare coverage in high school nor expensive college consultants. When I got to college (Cornell) all my friends told me they had plenty of extra time on the standardized exam (the SAT) by virtue of doctors letters declaring conditions requiring accommodations. I'm sure some of these were legitimate. But practically everyone I spoke to supposedly had ADHD and resulting accommodations on the SAT. I'm not a MPH or Epidemiologist, but does 80% or 90% of the student population truly have a condition requiring accommodations?
Once 10 or 20% of students are doing this, it isnt unexpected for everyone to start doing it just to get on an even playing field. As usual, the poor students lose out because they cannot afford the doctors or expediters who can facilitate all these things.
You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.
> "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?
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.
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.
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.
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
Well, considering * gestures broadly at everything *, I'm sure more than 38% of students are struggling with near-debilitating anxiety and depression. The future doesn't look very bright right now. I can't imagine what being in college must feel like. I've been doing this job for like 20 years and I feel incredibly uncertain about my future most days.
> 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.
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.
For hiring managers, does this devalue elite schools?
I’ve had good luck with places like Notre Dame and Cal Poly where the kids are smart, and willing to work very hard. From the Ivy League I’ve had more luck with Cornell hires than the others.
It’s a small sample size so I’m curious what others see.
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.
This is definition of “hacking” the system: YC included question on its application that asked founders to describe a time they most successfully "hacked" a non-computer system to their advantage.
Sure it is not nice or moral but that is the life now.
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.
People respond to incentives. Give disabled people advantages and you get more disabled people.
I got ok grades in high school with 0 effort. When I got to college, that changed drastically, as I never learned how to actually study or learn on my own. I was on academic probation after my first year and had to figure out how to study, since I never had to do it before. I never could figure out how some of my roommates could study for hours at a time each week, I didn’t really know what they were doing. One class let us make a 1 page cheat sheet for the exam, that was pretty effective for me; once I made it, I didn’t need it. So the night before an exam I would do that, even if I couldn’t use it. That seemed to be enough to get me off of academic probation and graduate in 4 years with a semi decent GPA… but that was also after switching to the business college, which was much less effort than engineering. The worst were 2 self-instructional classes I had. I forgot about them both completely. I did one of them in the last 48 hours of the semester and took 6 exams in one day.
Fast-forward 20+ years and I find out I have ASD and ADHD. Knowing may have helped give me some better ideas for strategies, but part of me is glad I didn’t know, because I didn’t have an excuse and found a way through. Though I’m not sure any of the accommodations I hear about would have been helpful. I never needed more time during tests and having to take care of an animal just sounds like more on my plate. Had I actually spent time with tutors to study, I likely would have burned out. I needed a lot of downtime away from people.
I can totally believe that some kids who excelled in high school, enough to get into Stanford, would fall apart in college without the same structure and would need some assistance. But I do question what that will do for them when they need to go out and get a job. I know companies are supposed to provide accommodations if needed, but I have to believe that will impact their career. I haven’t told my manager or anyone since I found out about my own issues. It used to not be a problem at all, as my old manager let me work my way and he may have even known before I did, he was good at picking all kinds of things out like that. Currently I’m struggling for the past 4 years or so, but I’m not sure what to do about it.
A few scattered comments, no single argument...
Performance-doping by a large percentage of students at prestigious schools has been going on for decades. Separate from the people who are wired differently and really need the chemical tuning.
Also, it seems a lot of students are on anti-depressants. (You might be, too, if you had pushy overachiever helicopter parents always pushing you. Or if the same career that paid for your affluent upbringing, including college admission advantages, came because a parent operated very selfishly in general.)
Meds seem to be a go-to solution for many affluent families.
Adderall doesn't let someone be the brightest student, but it helps them keep up with courseload, of study-heavy or lab-heavy classes -- to compete with the students who have better/more prior education/experience, better work practices, who prioritize studies over partying, or by otherwise being brighter as a student in some regard.
Of the students who didn't actually have an ADHD disability, but ended up relying on the meds anyway, they aren't bad people. They're actually generally nice and smart, like everyone else. I hope it keeps working for them, or they are able to wean off without ill effects.
One thing I really worry about is a different but related problem: a culture of cheating, most recently accelated by ChatGPT and the like. That seems to be having really bad societal effects already.
One thing I wonder about is whether some of the students on other meds, like for depression, are having too much edge of passion and creativity taken off. Although the college admissions and career prep books and coaches tell students how to give the corporate-standard performative indicators of "passion", that comes out as a very different thing, and maybe all the meds has something to do with that. (I suppose a professor who's been engaged for a few decades would have a good perspective on this.)
There's a GAO report from last year about the dramatic increase of students with disabilities in college.
In 2004/2008/2012, 11% of college students had disabilities. It was 21% in 2020.
In 2020, 69% of students with disabilities had behavioral or emotional conditions - up from 33% in 2004.
> one professor told Horowitch. "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests."
This is a blunt quote, but it gets at a key part of the problem: Qualifying as having a disability can come with some material benefits in many schools.
The intentions are good: Schools are doing what they think is best to accommodate and help students with disabilities. It has been a high priority for decades. However, some of these accommodations come with academic advantages. Extra time on tests is the most common one I've seen.
Combine this with the ease of qualifying for a disability (look up the right doctor online, schedule an appointment, pay insurance copay, walk out with a note) and it became an easy, cheap, and tangible academic advantage.
One of the schools I'm familiar with switched to giving everyone the same, longer time period for taking test because it was becoming obvious that the system was being abused.
I had a friend in high school who was able to take untimed tests. I later heard a teacher griping, because they didn't think my friend needed them. (I agree.)
My friend had a very good life, until he took a job that really clashed with his, uhm, tendency to be a perfectionist. When we caught up (because we hadn't spoken in a few years,) it was clear he didn't have much insight into how his perfectionism worked against him in the job. (It was a job where quantity was more important than perfection.)
What would have helped my friend more? Not the diagnosis that he needed untimed tests. Instead, counseling where he understood his difference, how to make best use of it, and when he needed to let go and not be a perfectionist.
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.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a surprising number of these disabilities require treatment with performance-enhancing drugs.
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.
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.)
It’s also worth mentioning that causality may go in the opposite direction: for the marginal student, part of why they got into Stanford was due to having more time than their peers to complete a test.
I got 1.5 extra test time. I would have never graduated otherwise. I didn't use it my senior year though. To this day, I read slower than most, I have to reread things when others don't need to. Intelligence and having learning disabilities are not corollated as this article suggests.
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.
Reading the comments here people seem to care more about what is "good" for the individual than what is good for the institution.
If you have learning disability that requires "assistance" at an elite university, then why can't I play in the NBA with stilts while being allowed to double dribble and travel?
Sure would be awesome for me to play in the NBA! Probably wouldn't be good for the NBA though.
> 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.
There was a kid in my high school physics class who went to Stanford. One time, someone broke the curve on the midterm test, making it hard for most students to get an A. The future Stanford student’s mom visited the teacher to beg for extra credit assignments. He got his A.
I suspect Stanford selects for students who are smart, yes, but most exceptional at gaming the system. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of watering down the difficulty of classes and standardized tests.
My father is a super stubborn Dutch guy. Needs to see proof of something 10 times before he changes a long held believe.
Long time ago something came up like this in the Netherlands. Some massive, unexplained increase in disability.
I asked how could this ever be possible?
He asked: "Are any of the disabilities that show a massive increase not objectively measurable but still eligible for subsidies?
At the time I thought it was such a backwards way of thinking but over the years I can't shake this sentence.
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 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.
> when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013, it significantly lowered the bar for an ADHD diagnosis.
I've suspected for many years that ADHD is like Medical Marijuana. Some people really need it. For others, it's just a way to get legal access to stimulants.
20+% of adults have anxiety, which they include here. So 38% for any of the conditions they listed ("mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD" plus everything else) doesn't seem off base.
The amount of pressure young kids are under... I am surprised the numbers aren't much higher. I grew up with debilitating OCD/Tourettes. I am glad kids growing up today have more resources than I did. Society itself is sick and broken. If that many kids are having issues.. Maybe the system is the problem here?
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of Stanford students are anxious or depressed. Isn't everybody, especially young kids who have spent the last decade going through the meat grinder of prepping for elite college admissions?
I was recently wondering that since in the US the race is declarative and such a big thing, why don't people self declare being <of the currently most interesting race>?
If this brings you points at entey exams or similar bonuses - why not (mis)using that mechanism?
Or maybe I have as a European the wrong impression about positive discrimination based on race in universities? (I do not nit jave recent data, just remember that people mentioned that they did not play the "race card" to be admitted)
We will end up with everyone identifying as disabled (or at least "neurodivergent"). Then we'll all be back on the same level and someone will have to invent a new category that will also grow until it too encompasses everyone. And so on.
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.
Easy solution, if you take extra accommodations, its noted on your degree. If you are an employer, do you want someone who manipulates the system in these ways? Me neither. Maybe note exactly the accommodations on the degree so those with real disabilities aren't caught up in this.
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).
edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.