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.)
Just curious: If non-neurodivergent children are given the same accomodations (which are?) do they significantly outperform their peers too? For example: it's well known that 1-on-1 instruction time correlates to better academic outcomes.
In some peculiar, perverted sense, given that evaluating claims of disability requires breaching students' medical privacy. You wouldn't normally expect libertarians to so overtly be okay with invasions of personal privacy.
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 would believe this, because I saw similar abuse of the housing system at my own university. If you were willing to (i.e. had the resources to) jump through the hoops, you could cut the line whether you deserved it or not.
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
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 place which advertise that they "get your kid accept to college" 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.
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.
> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.
Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.
Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture
Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.
Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.
For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
I agree with almost everything you say here. However, I wanted to point out that you make the same mistake the articles author does. "Disabled" and "Diagnosed" are not actually the same thing, even though we do describe ADHD and the like as "learning disabilities."
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
That doesn't fit the authors narrative, or trigger the human animals "unfairness" detector though so it makes a far less interesting article.
Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.
That people are lying about having a disability to get some sort of benefits they don’t need, likely at the expense of someone who does need those benefits.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
> there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
How do you know this?
Do you have access to their medical records?
Are you in HR and have access to any accomodations they may have filed?
Do they even have accommodations filed at work? Neither I nor many of the people I knew in university who had accommodations needed them in the workplace because the structure of an undergrad course setting is wildly different from that of an actual workplace.
I have told HR at basically every place I've worked that I had filed for accommodations during university and that I generally manage my disability well but that I may need to file for formal accommodations at some point in the future. This isn't something that I've necessarily told people I work with and it's not visible or obvious. Most disabilities aren't.
I'd say 30-40% is definitely in line with what I saw at various FAANG employers. Though it may be that other types of employer optimise less for those attributes.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
Have you considered that you yourself may be neurodivergent?
> > The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Just another anecdote, but where I work (tech startup) there are at least 7 other employees (that I know of) and I can identify every single one as autistic. Three are one type, another three are another type, and I think the one other as well as myself are the same type.
Research in the space hasn't advanced enough yet for this to be consensus, but in my opinion this preprint is exactly correct, and is what taught me that there are even subtypes to recognize at all: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...
There are, of course, plenty of non-neurodivergent tech companies. These are typically boring corporate ones, though I think there are some non-flashy ones that are perfectly respectable. I don't think Microsoft would count, though; Asperger's can look a lot like a lack of neurodivergence if you don't pay close enough attention.
Yup, a few bad apples start things off, and then after that many others who would have never been the first to do this decide to jump on the bandwagon (lest they be left behind). If it weren't for the shameless folks at the beginning, it wouldn't happen. But once they kick things off, it's a domino effect from there.
Thats true, but I think the blame is more on "American society" and not the kids working through the system.
50 years ago, college was cheaper. From what I understand getting jobs if you had a college degree was much easier. Social media didn't exist and people weren't connected to a universe of commentary 24/7. Kids are dealing with all this stuff, and if requesting a "disability accommodation" is helping them through it, that seems fine?
Failing out of college can be life-ruining. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-interest non-dischargeable debt and employment opportunities completely nuked.
Depends highly on your field. There are plenty of military personnel and commercial pilots hiding things or avoiding being seen for any kind of treatment, because a diagnosis could lose them their jobs.
Rolling out electronic health records has been a disaster for military recruiting, because such a large portion of kids flat-out lied on the medical screening, and 60+ percent of the population is already disqualified.
But, like—isn’t the bleaker thing that that seems so existential of an outcome? The vast majority don’t go to Stanford. The vast majority of those aren’t valedictorian.
And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war…
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war
By those metrics yes, but not by the more important metrics IMO of: buying a house, having a stable job, starting a family, etc.
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories,
I’ll buy this
>professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system,
I doubt this. Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
That is not to say things are worse than before. But humans view the world in relative terms, and they seem to expect more than reality can offer. And whereas before there was ignorance, today, there is widespread knowledge and visibility into the gulf between the have nots, the haves, and the have even mores.
True but I don't think that's out of the norm. The upper echelons of American society always consisted of a bunch of fake status games and abuses, a legacy admission is basically a socially accepted form of disability. Or non-ability, I guess.
America never had a rigorous meritocratic national system of education, it's a kind of half developed country in that sense that became democratic before it modernized (that is to say patronage survived) so you have this weird combination of family clans, nepo babies and networks competing with people who are where they are based on their performance.
Low trust society which is downstream of diversity. This is a tale as old (democracy ends in oligarchy came from Socrates? One of them) as time but somehow we thought it’d be different this time around. Obama had a book about how diverse democracies never work on his summer reading list - I’m guessing as some kind of cruel joke.
Things weren’t perfect, but they were a lot better.
Cultures that dislike diversity are pretty low-trust. Russia, North Korea, Iran come to mind. White American conservatives don't trust anyone who isn't also them. And so on.
I'm aware. See for instance, VC Arielle Zuckerberg's comment that when deciding which founders to fund she looks for "a little of the rizz and a little of the tis" with "rizz" referring to charisma and "tis" to autism.
One could argue that mythologizing a particular characteristic is itself a form of stigma.
>If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
This isn't even true either. In the past there was a huge emphasis and effort made toward character. Going out of your way to do the right thing and be helpful and NOT getting special treatment but choosing the difficult path.
Now everything is the opposite it's about getting as much special treatment as possible and shirking as much responsibility and this isn't just people it's throughout the corporate and political system as well.
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.
My kid hated school in kindergarten as well. As did I. I didn't get any kind of intervention, and I feel like that set me on a terrible course.
My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.
I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.
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.
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.
> 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?
The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article:
> In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.
So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
Being diagnosed with the disorder does not automatically qualify as a disability. This article, and many people in this thread seem not to be able to distinguish between the rising rate of diagnoses, and being disabled or needing accommodation.
I have been diagnosed as being several different types of neuro-divergent, but I am also not qualified as disabled and do not need or want any special dispensation. I would say that I have been relatively successful in life by almost anyone's metrics without it.
There is still an enormous advantage in understanding yourself, even without the expectation of accommodation or medication. I was also, sadly, not diagnosed until my mid-40's.
I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
If it turns out half of all people have something, it's just normal human stuff. Today's ADHD is likely a symptom of tiktoking your brain's serotonin out or some other chemical
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
Where does the idea/reasoning that highly academically successful students cannot have a disability come from?
I would go a step further and say there is probably a high chance that neurodivergent students are more academically successful, iff they did get to that level of education. And it's not impossible that they are overrepresented in that group of people.
And people may be intellectually gifted, and yet experience strong behavioral and social difficulties. Not that my own observation counts but I've met multiple people on the spectrum who were highly intelligent and "gifted" yet faced more adversity in life, i.e. for social reasons. It's controversial because it directly goes against the idea that we exist in a meritocracy.
People are going to cheat no matter what. To me, it's more important that the people who do need and deserve accomodations are able to get them though!
Nobody said that. They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled. That certainly was not the case as recently as a decade or two ago. People have not changed drastically, so what gives?
The necessary doctor's note can be trivially purchased without any meaningful evidence of disability. I know a number of children of wealthy families with these notes. They don't even pretend to be disabled, possession of the note makes it beyond question.
Buying an advantage for your children in this way is widespread. This article suggests that it is even more widespread than I imagined.
So, let's say we make it more difficult to get "proof" of disability, something that requires more than just a doctor's note.
Won't these rich people also be able to trivially acquire these, while people who actually need accomodations will continue to struggle because it's difficult to prove they need something?
Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it.
Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.
And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that.
Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to.
But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict.
Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious.
Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing.
And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints.
So, what do you do then?
> then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled
Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action.
Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
I once lived with a guy who had a valid disabled parking placard. But he didn't like to use it because he didn't feel like he really needed it. Once the apartment manager basically begged him to use it because parking was scarce in the complex and the disabled parking was under-utilized.
I don't think the dad necessarily sucks here. The dad didn't make up the system.
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.
Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.
---
To the edit, I can agree.
We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).
ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.
If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it.
Right. What I'm saying is that we've probably screwed up by creating a system that incentivizes people to "be disabled" even if they really are stretching the definition of disabled
I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
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.
You are implicitly hard-coupling work ethic and ease of learning. Especially in the U.S., it is within the realm of possibility that the students near the mean possess a comparative ease of learning but value that advantage at roughly 0%.
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.
As Scott Alexander opens his essay:
>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
Aren’t some of these “accommodations” for “disabilities” things as simple as, like, asking their professors not to put them on the spot in class if they have crippling social anxiety? Because while that might “toughen up” some people, with this person, that technique amounts to just punching them in the face for no constructive purpose?
How much of this is a terminology problem—that the word “disability” serves this blanket purpose for statutory reasons rather than to signal the type or severity of impairment?
Like, at the end of the day, these students still have to perform or not. I get the impression that a lot of these accommodations are kind of just a formal way of not being a dick about obstacles tangential to the actual learning.
I went to the university half way through my undergrad to file for a disability because I have ADHD and I go through short periods where my medication just stops being effective for whatever reason.
It's not a major disability but it was a barrier to me performing at my best so I filed the paperwork and got some minor accommodations. It was basic stuff like letting teachers know during periods when I was struggling and they would allow me to take tests in a separate room (same time limit, just by my self in a quiet room) or allow me an extra 24 hours on certain assignments provided I requested it X amount of days ahead of time.
Certainly they provided a minor "advantage" but not substantially. And these were things that most teachers are already generally willing to accommodate regardless of disability but the disability system provides a formal framework for doing so and avoiding the justifying yourself over and over again (vs just getting it cleared up at the start of the semester).
Disabilities come in many shapes and sizes. Most of them are small and it's way easier to deal with an office that deals specially with disabilities to come up with accommodations that make sense for you and keep them consistent across your entire time at university than it does to try and negotiate terms with every single professor or TA.
I know you did /s but in public school gifted programs here the gifted kids have IEPs (a document defining their Individualized Education Program) similar to what is required for special education kids with disabilities.
I can't talk about Stanford, but STEM-related jobs (including software engineering) certainly seem to be full of people with ADHD, autism and related "neurodivergances"
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these Stanford cases are people gaming the system. But I would be equally unsurprised if screening all students of elite universities revealed that over 50% of them had some condition listed in the DSM-5, with clear correlations between condition and field of study
> "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?
Testing accomodations are generally done at a separate time. So students with an accomodation requiring a low distraction environment or extra test time would all take their test after the main test takers.
This came with the dual advantage of providing an alternate time for students who had excused absences to take the test as well.
TLDR: You don't normally see the students with accomodations during tests unless you also have an accomodation or you had a conflict with the test time/date.
Most of my courses beyond freshman year were 10-20 people where I basically know everyone (unless they never come to class), so I would know if they weren’t showing up at exams. I’m pretty sure if these people were evenly distributed I would notice every exam for every class missing 1-2 people. So this is not it.
It really depends on the environment tbh. I know just for the "low distraction environment" accomodations, those normally aren't used for small classes but they are used for the big exams where they stuff the entire freshman class in the program into a series of auditoriums.
And of course some professors do double time accommodations by having the students take the test with everyone else and then follow the teacher to their office to finish the exam afterwards but tbh I didn't see that very often.
TFA is specifically about students claiming disabilities to get extra time on tests. I’m saying from first hand experience that I didn’t know a single instance of anyone getting extra time on tests, and wondering where those alleged instances were occurring. Anything that “wasn’t diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn’t good” (huh?) has nothing to do with the 38% stat, or anything else in the article, really.
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.
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'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."
> 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.
At the gym I go to, there are a lot of college-age kids. I overhear them talking about getting on Ritalin or Adderall to help them study. Not because they really need it, it's just seen as a "performance hack" to get an advantage. They talk about what doctor they went to and how easy it was to get a prescription.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Best teacher I had in university offered "unlimited time on tests". Their tests were hard as hell but they were scheduled after the last class of the day and ran until like 10 at night. It worked out to like 5 hours of test time even if most people could complete the test in like ~1.5-2 hours.
The policy was essentially "you have until the teacher/TA needs to go home" and given everyone in university is always swamped with work they were generally willing to stick around and get their own work done until it got super late and even then, even if you were the last test taker they'd generally negotiate a final 10-20 minutes with heads up so you could do your best to wrap up even if you weren't done.
But generally the rule is ~2x test time. The extended test time accomodation is normally listed as "double time" in my experience even if profs were generally willing to give you more than 2x time if you were still making meaningful progress.
> 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.
Fundamentally I would be fine with this, the system exploits us so it's only fair to exploit it in return. Practically, however, my concern remains for people who need resources to support them.
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.
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.
Reminds me of "Miracle Flights", in which dozens of people require wheelchairs to board but only a few require them to deboard. Of course, if you are in a wheelchair, you get to board first.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that says "I'm depressed." Which I'm sure exists, but I don't conflate pill-mills with responsible MDs, either.
Regardless, depending on the state, licensed counselors are qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, so not sure what your comment is getting at.
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.
As a "real" disabled person with autism...whatever that means.... This entire thread is very saddening. And lacking the usual debate vibe and is just people dumping their hate and frustration with no real sources or data or understanding :(
>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 don’t think the ADA allows charging people with disabilities extra. For example, if you claim you have a service dog, then you are legally not allowed to be charged pet fees.
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.)
Just curious: If non-neurodivergent children are given the same accomodations (which are?) do they significantly outperform their peers too? For example: it's well known that 1-on-1 instruction time correlates to better academic outcomes.
(I'm not an educator; I have no idea.)
What is neurodivergent though? If it’s a third of people, you can probably deem that normal.
> Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.
Libertarianism, it would seem
> Libertarianism, it would seem
In some peculiar, perverted sense, given that evaluating claims of disability requires breaching students' medical privacy. You wouldn't normally expect libertarians to so overtly be okay with invasions of personal privacy.
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 would believe this, because I saw similar abuse of the housing system at my own university. If you were willing to (i.e. had the resources to) jump through the hoops, you could cut the line whether you deserved it or not.
I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.
I suppose stanford does optimize for cheating, but this still seems excessive
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
In the culture I grew up in, this was considered cheating.
A culture that honored truth telling and integrity. Was that long ago or far away?
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
This is tragedy of the commons exactly. Whether it's moral depends entirely on the ethical theory you subscribe to.
> a problem with Stanford's definitions
Only if students aren't lying on their application.
Tell us more about your culture and upbringing
> The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
I'm glad you had no problem with "dumpster fuck".
Maybe true in India and China but here it’s culturally not acceptable.
please... enough with the lazy stereotypes
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 place which advertise that they "get your kid accept to college" 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.
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.
> people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Of course, that applies to everybody who achieves a stable career at all.
Exceedingly few people (if anyone) are competent and capable at everything, even when you're just talking about basic skills that are handy for common, everyday work.
Your doctor may be a incorrigibly terrible driver, your bus driver may pass out at the sight of blood, your Michelin chef might have been never made sense of geometry, your mechanic may need deep focus just to read through a manual, your bricklayer might go into a panic if they need to stand in front of a crowd, your bartender may never have experienced a clear thought before 11am.
Struggling with some things, even deeply struggling, is normal if not universal. But once you age past the gauntlet of general education that specifically tests all these things, the hope is that you can just sort of flow like water into a valuable enough community role that you can take care of yourself and help some people.
A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture stirs up an idea that there must be something unusual about you if you find this thing or that thing difficult, when the reality is that everybody has a few things that they struggle with quite a lot, and that the people who seem like they don't have just succeeded at avoiding, delegating, or hiding whatever it is that's hard for them.
Well put.
> A lot of modern, aspiring-middle-class and online culture
Theres also a pernicious way of identifying with the struggle. Instead of I have trouble focusing in certain situations, so maybe I should find ways to spend my time (careers, hobbies) that work well with that. We instead go to 'I have ADHD' and my 'job' should make special accommodations for me.
Regardless of whether a job should or should not make accommodations. It's not a very helpful construct to think they should. It removes agency from the person experiencing the struggle. Which in turn puts them farther from finding a place that they would fit in well.
For the vast majority of behaviors (ADHD, attachment issues, autism, etc) they exist on a continuum and are adaptive/helpful in certain situations. By pathologizing them, we(society) loose touch for what they mean in our life. It also makes discourse hard because the (this is causing me to truly not be able to function) gets mixed in with the (this is a way that my brain behaves, but I can mostly live a life).
> Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
I agree with almost everything you say here. However, I wanted to point out that you make the same mistake the articles author does. "Disabled" and "Diagnosed" are not actually the same thing, even though we do describe ADHD and the like as "learning disabilities."
Being diagnosed with a learning disability or other type of neuro-divergency does not automatically entitle someone to special treatment. The vast majority of that 38% are likely just "diagnosed" people who are asking for no special treatment at all.
That doesn't fit the authors narrative, or trigger the human animals "unfairness" detector though so it makes a far less interesting article.
Have you tried Adderall? It gives extreme competitive edge. Just to get legal and easy access to performance-enhancing drugs in elite educational (aka competitive) setting it makes sense to get "disability".
And given how loosely these conditions are defined, it's not even cheating in the true sense of the word.
> I think there's a non-malicious explanation for a percentage of this.
What on earth is a "malicious" explanation of this?
Getting a diagnosis to get more time to complete tests. https://accommodations.collegeboard.org/how-accommodations-w...
That people know they do not actually need/qualify for accommodations, but misrepresent themselves in order to get them?
That people are lying about having a disability to get some sort of benefits they don’t need, likely at the expense of someone who does need those benefits.
What they get is amphetamines, legally.
38% of stanford kids taking or selling drugs, legally, because they are rich kids: and the poor kids get jail time for buying it off them.
Go USA.
Wierd that no-one on this thread seems aware of it.
There are two standard treatments for adhd: met & dexies midnight runners.
this is not true, educate yourself.
> The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
> there's a big cadre or neurodivergent people that are just in the line where they are very productive workers anyway
Alternatively, it just became popular to label others or oneself that way. And tech elites have nothing better to do in free time. Also DEI benefits! Who else would be allowed a medical break due to a burnout and stress?
[delayed]
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
How do you know this?
Do you have access to their medical records?
Are you in HR and have access to any accomodations they may have filed?
Do they even have accommodations filed at work? Neither I nor many of the people I knew in university who had accommodations needed them in the workplace because the structure of an undergrad course setting is wildly different from that of an actual workplace.
I have told HR at basically every place I've worked that I had filed for accommodations during university and that I generally manage my disability well but that I may need to file for formal accommodations at some point in the future. This isn't something that I've necessarily told people I work with and it's not visible or obvious. Most disabilities aren't.
> Is it much though? 38%?
I'd say 30-40% is definitely in line with what I saw at various FAANG employers. Though it may be that other types of employer optimise less for those attributes.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
Have you considered that you yourself may be neurodivergent?
>I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies
How does one even know this? Do you ask everyone you meet if they are neuro-divergent? That’s awkward as hell.
> I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
I'm guessing you are blind, yea? Otherwise how could you otherwise justify such a statement?
> > The percentages of workers that are neurodivergent is much higher than usual
> Is it much though? 38%? I haven't seen one in 15 years across 5+ different companies.
Just another anecdote, but where I work (tech startup) there are at least 7 other employees (that I know of) and I can identify every single one as autistic. Three are one type, another three are another type, and I think the one other as well as myself are the same type.
Research in the space hasn't advanced enough yet for this to be consensus, but in my opinion this preprint is exactly correct, and is what taught me that there are even subtypes to recognize at all: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biologica...
There are, of course, plenty of non-neurodivergent tech companies. These are typically boring corporate ones, though I think there are some non-flashy ones that are perfectly respectable. I don't think Microsoft would count, though; Asperger's can look a lot like a lack of neurodivergence if you don't pay close enough attention.
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.
Basic game theory at work right there. You only need a few bad apples to cause the entire system to devolve.
Yup, a few bad apples start things off, and then after that many others who would have never been the first to do this decide to jump on the bandwagon (lest they be left behind). If it weren't for the shameless folks at the beginning, it wouldn't happen. But once they kick things off, it's a domino effect from there.
Thats true, but I think the blame is more on "American society" and not the kids working through the system.
50 years ago, college was cheaper. From what I understand getting jobs if you had a college degree was much easier. Social media didn't exist and people weren't connected to a universe of commentary 24/7. Kids are dealing with all this stuff, and if requesting a "disability accommodation" is helping them through it, that seems fine?
Failing out of college can be life-ruining. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-interest non-dischargeable debt and employment opportunities completely nuked.
Indeed, it's much more reflective of American society in 2025 than it is of the individual students (or even Stanford in general).
Depends highly on your field. There are plenty of military personnel and commercial pilots hiding things or avoiding being seen for any kind of treatment, because a diagnosis could lose them their jobs.
Rolling out electronic health records has been a disaster for military recruiting, because such a large portion of kids flat-out lied on the medical screening, and 60+ percent of the population is already disqualified.
Yea I was depressed and it turned into a whole thing. Military especially hide mental issues due to the stigma and chance to lose your livelihood.
But, like—isn’t the bleaker thing that that seems so existential of an outcome? The vast majority don’t go to Stanford. The vast majority of those aren’t valedictorian.
And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war…
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories, professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system, going their whole life without participating in war
By those metrics yes, but not by the more important metrics IMO of: buying a house, having a stable job, starting a family, etc.
> And the vast majority of that vast majority’s lives in the US work out, you know, fine—mostly including things like climate-controlled indoor spaces, ample calories,
I’ll buy this
>professional medical care, access to some kind of justice system,
I doubt this. Most people in the US are probably aware one healthcare or legal issue in their family will derail the whole family’s future.
That is not to say things are worse than before. But humans view the world in relative terms, and they seem to expect more than reality can offer. And whereas before there was ignorance, today, there is widespread knowledge and visibility into the gulf between the have nots, the haves, and the have even mores.
True but I don't think that's out of the norm. The upper echelons of American society always consisted of a bunch of fake status games and abuses, a legacy admission is basically a socially accepted form of disability. Or non-ability, I guess.
America never had a rigorous meritocratic national system of education, it's a kind of half developed country in that sense that became democratic before it modernized (that is to say patronage survived) so you have this weird combination of family clans, nepo babies and networks competing with people who are where they are based on their performance.
Low trust society which is downstream of diversity. This is a tale as old (democracy ends in oligarchy came from Socrates? One of them) as time but somehow we thought it’d be different this time around. Obama had a book about how diverse democracies never work on his summer reading list - I’m guessing as some kind of cruel joke.
Things weren’t perfect, but they were a lot better.
American society is high trust and diverse. Lots of interesting charts here: https://ourworldindata.org/trust
Look here: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
Cultures that dislike diversity are pretty low-trust. Russia, North Korea, Iran come to mind. White American conservatives don't trust anyone who isn't also them. And so on.
There are also cultures that aren't very diverse that are pretty high-trust: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan, even China.
Which goes to say, diversity likely has very little to do with whether a society is low-trust or high-trust. It's more about politics and policy.
I think the user you replied to is referring to things like the Putnam findings on the effects of diversity https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FvFN8ACY6taivkcbzDGgYy1-EPb...
Also relevant: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
Pretty sure it was always like this
No, "disability" used to be something of a stigma. Now it's celebrated, and people proudly identify with it.
If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
some disabilities have mostly lost their stigma, sure.
Many have not.
I can tell you from personal experience as a person with a physical disability that it's still very much a stigma.
It's also very much possible for something to be both a stigma and an identity. In fact, the stigmatization can make the identity stronger.
Well, some kinds of disability still are a stigma, but here on HN neurodiversity/autism is celebrated as some kind of superpower, basically.
I'm aware. See for instance, VC Arielle Zuckerberg's comment that when deciding which founders to fund she looks for "a little of the rizz and a little of the tis" with "rizz" referring to charisma and "tis" to autism.
One could argue that mythologizing a particular characteristic is itself a form of stigma.
>If you're saying that people always try to game the system, whatever it is, then I agree however.
This isn't even true either. In the past there was a huge emphasis and effort made toward character. Going out of your way to do the right thing and be helpful and NOT getting special treatment but choosing the difficult path.
Now everything is the opposite it's about getting as much special treatment as possible and shirking as much responsibility and this isn't just people it's throughout the corporate and political system as well.
Yeah, good times create weak men, and all that. I agree.
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.
My kid hated school in kindergarten as well. As did I. I didn't get any kind of intervention, and I feel like that set me on a terrible course.
My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.
I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.
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.
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.
Same. I was on academic probation freshman year. Managed to recover and graduate. But I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD/ASD until I was 38.
> 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?
The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article:
> In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.
So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
Being diagnosed with the disorder does not automatically qualify as a disability. This article, and many people in this thread seem not to be able to distinguish between the rising rate of diagnoses, and being disabled or needing accommodation.
I have been diagnosed as being several different types of neuro-divergent, but I am also not qualified as disabled and do not need or want any special dispensation. I would say that I have been relatively successful in life by almost anyone's metrics without it.
There is still an enormous advantage in understanding yourself, even without the expectation of accommodation or medication. I was also, sadly, not diagnosed until my mid-40's.
I would have had a much easier time getting to where I am today if diagnostic criteria and awareness among clinical staff were better when I was younger.
If it turns out half of all people have something, it's just normal human stuff. Today's ADHD is likely a symptom of tiktoking your brain's serotonin out or some other chemical
Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
Where does the idea/reasoning that highly academically successful students cannot have a disability come from?
I would go a step further and say there is probably a high chance that neurodivergent students are more academically successful, iff they did get to that level of education. And it's not impossible that they are overrepresented in that group of people.
And people may be intellectually gifted, and yet experience strong behavioral and social difficulties. Not that my own observation counts but I've met multiple people on the spectrum who were highly intelligent and "gifted" yet faced more adversity in life, i.e. for social reasons. It's controversial because it directly goes against the idea that we exist in a meritocracy.
People are going to cheat no matter what. To me, it's more important that the people who do need and deserve accomodations are able to get them though!
Nobody said that. They said that 38% of successful students are unlikely to be disabled. That certainly was not the case as recently as a decade or two ago. People have not changed drastically, so what gives?
The necessary doctor's note can be trivially purchased without any meaningful evidence of disability. I know a number of children of wealthy families with these notes. They don't even pretend to be disabled, possession of the note makes it beyond question.
Buying an advantage for your children in this way is widespread. This article suggests that it is even more widespread than I imagined.
So, let's say we make it more difficult to get "proof" of disability, something that requires more than just a doctor's note.
Won't these rich people also be able to trivially acquire these, while people who actually need accomodations will continue to struggle because it's difficult to prove they need something?
Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it.
Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.
And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.
That's exactly the dilemma.
Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that.
Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to.
But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict.
Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious.
Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
[delayed]
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing.
And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints.
So, what do you do then?
> then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled
Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action.
Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
Article about this by Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
once expertise can drive benefits, expertise becomes a target for corruption
weirdly: if you want good scientists, don't listen to them!
It is probably not good if nearly half (38% qualifies as nearly half, right?) of students are considered disabled and needing accommodations, right?
Surely nearly half of any given public population can't be disabled?
25% of Americans have a disability, https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/media/pdfs/disabil...
We don't know what's the percentage broken down by age.
If 38% is almost 50%, 25% is almost 38%.
My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
Your dad, not everyone, sucks.
I once lived with a guy who had a valid disabled parking placard. But he didn't like to use it because he didn't feel like he really needed it. Once the apartment manager basically begged him to use it because parking was scarce in the complex and the disabled parking was under-utilized.
I don't think the dad necessarily sucks here. The dad didn't make up the system.
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa...
Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.
---
To the edit, I can agree.
We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).
ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.
If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
Who are you to say what should be included or not, that something can be gauged as mild or not, and that there should be a treshold?
>Who are you to say what should be included or not, that something can be gauged as mild or not, and that there should be a treshold?
They're bananalychee, that's who they are!
What are you, some kind of anarchist?
All hail bananalychee! Master of the Universe and the last word on all things!
Please bless me bananalychee by impregnating my wife and daughters!
They're quite obviously not.
They're lying so they can get unlimited time on the test and/or look at their phone.
They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!
> They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!
This is just not an acceptable cultural viewpoint. Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.
> Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.
Fine. Where are the doctors? Why is the debate on the students?
Both are culpable.
That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it.
God have mercy on us.
You clearly know nothing about how these accommodations are handled.
Can you clarify? I heard about the test time thing from students. That corroborates the parent comment.
Right. What I'm saying is that we've probably screwed up by creating a system that incentivizes people to "be disabled" even if they really are stretching the definition of disabled
I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
Most everyone has some disability or other. Just because you may work around it or not think of it that way, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
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 was sure you were going to say "then it follows that the top 0.1% must be 100% learning disabled."
You are implicitly hard-coupling work ethic and ease of learning. Especially in the U.S., it is within the realm of possibility that the students near the mean possess a comparative ease of learning but value that advantage at roughly 0%.
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.
As Scott Alexander opens his essay:
>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
Aren’t some of these “accommodations” for “disabilities” things as simple as, like, asking their professors not to put them on the spot in class if they have crippling social anxiety? Because while that might “toughen up” some people, with this person, that technique amounts to just punching them in the face for no constructive purpose?
How much of this is a terminology problem—that the word “disability” serves this blanket purpose for statutory reasons rather than to signal the type or severity of impairment?
Like, at the end of the day, these students still have to perform or not. I get the impression that a lot of these accommodations are kind of just a formal way of not being a dick about obstacles tangential to the actual learning.
I went to the university half way through my undergrad to file for a disability because I have ADHD and I go through short periods where my medication just stops being effective for whatever reason.
It's not a major disability but it was a barrier to me performing at my best so I filed the paperwork and got some minor accommodations. It was basic stuff like letting teachers know during periods when I was struggling and they would allow me to take tests in a separate room (same time limit, just by my self in a quiet room) or allow me an extra 24 hours on certain assignments provided I requested it X amount of days ahead of time.
Certainly they provided a minor "advantage" but not substantially. And these were things that most teachers are already generally willing to accommodate regardless of disability but the disability system provides a formal framework for doing so and avoiding the justifying yourself over and over again (vs just getting it cleared up at the start of the semester).
Disabilities come in many shapes and sizes. Most of them are small and it's way easier to deal with an office that deals specially with disabilities to come up with accommodations that make sense for you and keep them consistent across your entire time at university than it does to try and negotiate terms with every single professor or TA.
Maybe they're all that academically gifted kinda autism and students near the mean are less likely to be disabled? /s
I know you did /s but in public school gifted programs here the gifted kids have IEPs (a document defining their Individualized Education Program) similar to what is required for special education kids with disabilities.
I can't talk about Stanford, but STEM-related jobs (including software engineering) certainly seem to be full of people with ADHD, autism and related "neurodivergances"
I wouldn't be surprised if most of these Stanford cases are people gaming the system. But I would be equally unsurprised if screening all students of elite universities revealed that over 50% of them had some condition listed in the DSM-5, with clear correlations between condition and field of study
> "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?
> So where were these people during my time?
Testing accomodations are generally done at a separate time. So students with an accomodation requiring a low distraction environment or extra test time would all take their test after the main test takers.
This came with the dual advantage of providing an alternate time for students who had excused absences to take the test as well.
TLDR: You don't normally see the students with accomodations during tests unless you also have an accomodation or you had a conflict with the test time/date.
Most of my courses beyond freshman year were 10-20 people where I basically know everyone (unless they never come to class), so I would know if they weren’t showing up at exams. I’m pretty sure if these people were evenly distributed I would notice every exam for every class missing 1-2 people. So this is not it.
It really depends on the environment tbh. I know just for the "low distraction environment" accomodations, those normally aren't used for small classes but they are used for the big exams where they stuff the entire freshman class in the program into a series of auditoriums.
And of course some professors do double time accommodations by having the students take the test with everyone else and then follow the teacher to their office to finish the exam afterwards but tbh I didn't see that very often.
Or it wasn't diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn't good. Doesn't mean that they weren't there.
TFA is specifically about students claiming disabilities to get extra time on tests. I’m saying from first hand experience that I didn’t know a single instance of anyone getting extra time on tests, and wondering where those alleged instances were occurring. Anything that “wasn’t diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn’t good” (huh?) has nothing to do with the 38% stat, or anything else in the article, really.
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.
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'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."
> 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.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a surprising number of these disabilities require treatment with performance-enhancing drugs.
At the gym I go to, there are a lot of college-age kids. I overhear them talking about getting on Ritalin or Adderall to help them study. Not because they really need it, it's just seen as a "performance hack" to get an advantage. They talk about what doctor they went to and how easy it was to get a prescription.
I read somewhere that Adderall does not improve cognitive function in people without ADHD and in some cases can even decrease 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.
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.
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.
Why can't everyone get extra time?
Everyone who runs out of time does actually need extra time!
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.
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.
How much time is enough, then? Do they get all day? A week? As long as it takes?
Best teacher I had in university offered "unlimited time on tests". Their tests were hard as hell but they were scheduled after the last class of the day and ran until like 10 at night. It worked out to like 5 hours of test time even if most people could complete the test in like ~1.5-2 hours.
The policy was essentially "you have until the teacher/TA needs to go home" and given everyone in university is always swamped with work they were generally willing to stick around and get their own work done until it got super late and even then, even if you were the last test taker they'd generally negotiate a final 10-20 minutes with heads up so you could do your best to wrap up even if you weren't done.
But generally the rule is ~2x test time. The extended test time accomodation is normally listed as "double time" in my experience even if profs were generally willing to give you more than 2x time if you were still making meaningful progress.
Given the context of this discussion, the answer would be "whatever extra time they're giving to the disabled folks".
> 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.
Maybe the smartest, most promising young people in the country realize it is smart to claim a disability.
I am not saying they don't have one. I am saying some people have realized ways it helps to point it out and maybe not everyone is clued into that.
Fundamentally I would be fine with this, the system exploits us so it's only fair to exploit it in return. Practically, however, my concern remains for people who need resources to support them.
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.
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.
People respond to incentives. Give disabled people advantages and you get more disabled people.
Reminds me of "Miracle Flights", in which dozens of people require wheelchairs to board but only a few require them to deboard. Of course, if you are in a wheelchair, you get to board first.
https://www.explore.com/1804742/not-divine-story-miracle-fli...
Reminds me of the Asymptomatic Tourette's video https://youtu.be/H9X3GkacXG8
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.
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.
> in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything
I don't think this is a complete picture? Sure, they have to provide a diagnosis in order to bill insurance, but that can be something like F43.2/adjustment disorder, which is not a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety. Your comment makes it sound the typical experience is that you can just waltz into a talk therapist's office and be handed a slip of paper that says "I'm depressed." Which I'm sure exists, but I don't conflate pill-mills with responsible MDs, either.
Regardless, depending on the state, licensed counselors are qualified to diagnose mental health disorders, so not sure what your comment is getting at.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior"
Better rooms, more time on tests, sympathy, and more....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.
As a "real" disabled person with autism...whatever that means.... This entire thread is very saddening. And lacking the usual debate vibe and is just people dumping their hate and frustration with no real sources or data or understanding :(
>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.
So rich people should be able to pay for extra time on tests?
I don’t see how that is pushing back or solving any of the problems the article talks about.
I don’t think the ADA allows charging people with disabilities extra. For example, if you claim you have a service dog, then you are legally not allowed to be charged pet fees.
Related:
Accommodation Nation: America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121559