Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

[flagged]

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

What a disgusting article. It's abliest to say that disabled students won't be able to make it Stanford. The only weird part is calling anxiety and depression a disability.

Saying that people who are using accommodations are cheating is morally repugnant.

Instead of saying that we need to clamp down on people claiming disabilities, we should open up the accommodations to everyone.

"Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD."

This is clickbait. There are diseases and disorders, and we have medicine to treat them so that people can be functional in society (particularly, work and school).

Nothingburger.

Is it really surprising that the top minds in STEM might not be neuro-typical?

You can't tell me you think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk (!), etc., have "normal" brains.

Whether that should count as a disability or a superpower is subjective. ADHD and Autism often present as strengths in one arena, and weaknesses in another. Speaking overly broadly: An aptitude for hard facts and logic, with a difficulty with emotions and social cues.

That's not to say that everyone who presents as such should be given the same accommodations. It's probably being abused. But that doesn't mean they're lying about their brains. It took a doctor to diagnose it. What more would you want to see beyond "a doctors note"?

I watch a lot of bodycam DUI arrests on Youtube (I'm not proud of it - it's a guilty pleasure) and something I have noticed is that close to 100% of young female suspects claim to have ADHD, anxiety, depression or all 3. This generation has been trained to use these three pathologies to excuse poor behaviours. So it wouldn't be a surprise to see them using it to excuse poor academics, even preemptively.

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.

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.

just LOL

A lot of commenters have focused on the ADHD, but the 38% number is from anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

... and this generation of students has every reason to be anxious and depressed. I'm surprised the number isn't over 50%. They're watching the white-collar jobs (the kind of jobs that justify a Stanford degree price-tag) get hammered by AI with no plan to back-stop the unemployment resulting than the same answers from the past (i.e. mutterings of "bootstraps" and "saving" and "stop eating avocado toast"), they're watching fascism creep over the nations of the world again, they're watching the annual thermometer rise, the weather get worse, and the world pass tipping-point numbers that our best models suggest will lead to incredibly sweeping climate changes... And they're watching the current leadership of the planet do not enough to address any of this.

I have a teenage niece that is 100% convinced she'll never own a home. I don't have anything concrete to tell her to convince her otherwise.

So yeah... Maybe those double-digit percentage numbers are pretty justified by all of this.

[dead]

Tldr: If you are actually smart, you leverage as much of the social system to your advantage that you can get away with. It's called being street smart. Don't blame the kids for being street smart.

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

From the website for Stanford's OAE:

"The need for therapy and other kinds of mental health care is often stigmatized in our home communities. Even though our families love us, they believe other options will better help us with our problems."

Imagine paying Standford tuition for your kid so they can fund this sort of know-it-all BS that attempts to undermine relationships. "it's not that your family doesn't love you, they're jsut stupid and don't known as much as us." They have a major conflict of interest in getting people diagnosed and registered with their services.

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.