alt Hacker NewsWhy are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
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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.
My general impression of kids from elite colleges are that they're very good at finding some sort of loophole in the system to exploit, and they get lauded for it. And if they balk, for whatever reason, they feel like they're falling behind those that do. So then there's a feedback loop for everyone to take advantage of some kind of exploit to stay competitive. "You'd be stupid not to do X also, if everyone else is." with no consider to morals or character--because they're not easy to measure.
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.
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-outcomeThe most illuminating line:
> here's been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker
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.)
Reminds me of the Asymptomatic Tourette's video https://youtu.be/H9X3GkacXG8
Wifey works at uni. From all her stories, sounds like a strategy I'd adopt to boost my GPA, if it existed back then.
Of course, there are also true cases where it takes 4 hours to complete a 30-minute test.
All it does is kill the GPA signal completely. One amongst many before, pure noise now.
[edit: not denying people need it. but it appears like folks that don't also use it]
There seems to be an obvious solution.
When I went to the DMV and couldn't pass the vision test without my glasses, they put on my driver's license an indication that I only passed with the accommodation of corrective lenses.
> when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013
Does Reason do even the most basic fact checking? The most recent “issue” of the DSM (DSM-V-TR) was released in 2022.
The article frames being smart and promising (to a university) as at odds with having a learning disability, which is not necessarily true. It also frames depression and anxiety as learning disabilities, which they are not.
While I agree that smart people tend to play the system, I will offer another explanation.
I think university students are just weirder now. They just don't have the same social skills as before. Maybe Covid has erased social skills and behaviors, or maybe the internet is too prevalent.
I don't know what the social equivalent of the Overton Window would be, but I think that's shifted so hard that traditional autism tests would mark most modern students as autistic.
Lots to unpack in this so this following isn’t representative of my view on all of the article:
Cheating? Really? There’s a passing reference to getting an accommodation if partly through convenience as cheating. This throwaway line holds a lot of the problems of education in it. It denotes a view where education is less about learning than point scoring. Getting an accommodation for an extra day on a project is no more cheating than if a student asked for an extension.
Plenty of other accommodations, though maybe not all, are similarly not-cheating. It’s not cheating. It’s also not fair but so what? Put aside the system burdens doing this under the ADA may cause and your left with, what? Students being given more leeway and flexibility to 1) learn and 2) demonstrate that they have learned material.
This should be much less about “omg students taking advantage” and more about about “hmm, maybe this says a lot about how poorly things are currently done and better they could be with more thoughtful design”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm too cold or cynical here, but I would make it compulsory to indicate the disability in the diploma with an annotation or comment.
Or possibly the other way around: "Completed degree on standardized terms "
Isn't it strategic at this point? Why not use the "disabled" card if it'll get you better results for similar cost?
The same reason so many have a medical marijuana prescription, or a disabled license plate, or a 'service animal' that they bring into restaurants, grocery stores, and airplanes, or so many people take advantage of wheelchair service at airports then walk off the plane without help. If there is a system, people will find a way to abuse it and find shortcuts and loopholes to exploit.
Ok, so we are raising a bunch of cheaters and liars. Great.
When the get to the workforce, then what? When I was in a position to hire, I made the decision to not interview anyone who went to Elon. The school did not in the early 2000s use a standard grammar book and at least according to my kid's papers, the profs had little to say about poor grammar, rambling sentences, poor logic, etc. Great.
Since the work was about writing and speaking, grammar and logic were important. Fast forward to today, and I guess I'd have to make a decision about not interviewing kids from top-tier schools.
The entire system from early education to corporate is setup to reward dishonesty, and then we are curious why we are lead by the dishonest.
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.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior"
- Charlie Munger
Gee idk could be toxic environment
medical industrial complex
toxic food
air pollution
enshittification happening in all industries
it's destroying the integrity of the human genome with each subsequent generation worse and worse and will result in a culling of the species over time toward more stable subgroups likely in more remote regions not affected by these things as much
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...
Related:
Accommodation Nation: America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem
Why put a time limit on exams? Why not put everyone on the same playing field by allowing unlimited time to take the exam? The majority of exams at my university have no time limit (within the operating hours of the testing center), and it works well. At the end of the day, if you don't know the material, having more time isn't going to help you.
> Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. ... Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus.
"Obviously"? "is clearly bogus?"
Not to me. I see too much rhetoric and assumptions. In an article in Reason magazine, I expect more -- to demonstrate careful thinking that cuts through lazy common-sense thinking.
To make sense of a situation, one of my favorite tools is simple: a causal diagram(s). See [1]. This requires effort, and it should. Making a useful, communicable model that forms the foundation for your argument takes practice. Here's a disability-related example: [2]
I want to live in a world where causal models are demanded by readers.
[1]: https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/images/volu...
because leadership needed a lot of irrrrational bullshit to justify their incompetence in the urgently imminent case that the biological and academic descendants of their "generation" outperformed them in a a ... waffle? whiff? ... I apologize, I don't know the term, and I only identified part of the heap of bullshit the old "guard" used to keep the kids "dumb enough" (136.9 - 144.3 IQ when they enter the horticultured league) but it's a great concern, nevertheless ... "housing"? ... in 2025? how retarded were you peeps 15 years ago? how the fuck did you survive? OH WAIT, YOU BOMBED IRAN? brrrrr, so evil of youuuuu
but it's wonderful we can debate this, really. I'm glad we get to exchange words, everybody, all of us!
Thank GOD, the OLD FATHERS of academia left some room ... to walk circles in ... and that they left so many of the questions they had and inspired to be left unanswered by the few/many who got in/didn't get in(to) the space that would give the incredible rarity of human brains with that specific kind of passionate curiosity in this (Tao universe measure something) vast galaxy of ours that bit they ... deserved? needed? wanted? desired? hundreds/thousands of generations worked incomparably hard for ... ???
so that we wouldn't be cursed with looking at the results of TWO COMPANIES IN 20-FUCKING-25 that are tapping that insanely sexy big ass of Space around this cutesy blue-and-green little planet of hours/ sorry, ... "ours", ... like, ... somewhat "ours" ... ... ...
Heyyyyy, are there any cool new toys on Alibaba or whatever the name is or something? There's some German genes in the neighborhood who can use a camera
My wife has a cousin who basically gamed the system for undergraduate and law school. She grew up white, middle class, but her dad, being of Mexican descent (US born) allowed her to play up the Hispanic angle on college applications, landing her scholarships and better admissions. Then, for law school, she claimed she had ADHD so that she could get extra time on tests. It was all a scam.
why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're left-handed?
Dude lost me at the first sentence: "The students at America's elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country."
Very clearly the author has never visited Stanford or UCB.
Which is to say, "elite" universities do not base admissions solely on what I assume they mean when they say "smartest."
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.
Probably the same reason why half of HackerNews think they have ADHD.
It’s matter of incentives. Everyone knows the value of college is in the piece of paper they give you at the end, the things they teach you are not super helpful in real world. So people cheat so they don’t have to waste time learning useless knowledge and instead spend that time on something valuable, like working out or going to a party.
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.
>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.
Would love to see the percentage of Forbes 30u30 who also had (sorry, claimed) a disability in college.
This is what trending towards zero sum looks like. The cracks in society are growing ever wider. Failure to get into the top schools and obtain top grades is perceived as potentially life ruining. Hence all this cheating, and, also, grade inflation.
I had a college roommate who got hit by a car and was in a coma with lasting mental deficits. He was a mechanical engineering major, and because of his "disability" he got 2x time allowed on exams. It did not seem right to me, but oh well.
Because it's bullshit? Kids today don't understand that they are not special, everyone's different and the diagnosis you get from a TikTok video is not real.
this is a flat out lie and a case of bad journalism
it's not 38% - it's 1 in 4 or 25%, according to Stanford's own website https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae
and that number includes students getting literally any kind of accommodation whatsoever. Allergies, food allergies, carpet replacement, etc, etc
Why wouldn’t they, if it gives them some advantage?
It actually makes sense that the smartest people in our society would be disabled, right?
The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.
My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic
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.