Professors are calling out the alarming rise in students diagnosed as “disabled” at elite universities to get special accommodations in class and on exams.
One in five students at Brown and Harvard are now registered as having some form of disability, according to an analysis by The Atlantic — but professors suspect some of them are bogus.
“I have heard from many people that this is the way that rich people scam the system to help their kids,” a computer science professor at a west coast state school, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.
“Almost anyone can get an accommodation. You just have to hire someone to do an assessment and write up a report.”
Many students claim they suffer anxiety, ADHD or depression, among other conditions. It’s not just unfair — it’s also potentially degrading the function of exams as a test of ability.
At Stanford, 38% of students have registered with the Office of Accessible Education, and 1 in 8 undergraduates received accommodations as of this fall.
The number of students receiving testing accommodations has tripled in eight years at the University of Chicago and quintupled in the past 15 years at UC Berkeley, the Atlantic reported.
Extra time is beneficial to students with learning disabilities and allows them to perform statistically better than their disabled peers without accommodations, according to the Institute of Education Sciences. But students who do not legitimately need extra time can benefit unfairly if accommodations are granted.
The computer science professor was recently in a faculty meeting about special accommodations when a representative for the school’s disability office said requests from students have doubled in the last five years.
The school grants “time and a half” to disabled students, but, according to the professor, they will give double time to students who complain time and a half is inadequate.
“How in the world do they figure this out,” he wondered. “Is there any research to back up the idea that a 50% increase [in time] is appropriate or a 100% increase?”
University of Utah sociology professor Nicholas Wolfinger said a kid with an accommodation was a “rarity” when he started teaching in 1998, but now he estimates one in 10 of his students have one.
“Since COVID, there’s been an explosion in the number of students granted accommodations,” he said. “It was a gradual increase and then it exploded.”
He worries students are becoming accustomed to advantages that won’t follow them into the real world, adding: “Students will find that when they graduate college, they cannot go to their boss and say, ‘Hey I can’t turn this in by Friday.’ I don’t think that’s gonna fly.”
Several other professors share this concern.
“They will find it emotionally jarring when supervisors don’t make accommodations,” a political science professor at a top 20 university concurred. “I can’t imagine employers give these kinds of accommodations.”
He told The Post he believes “excessive accommodations are granted” at his school, where about 10 percent of students in his classes get extra time.
A professor who studies ADHD at a large public university told The Post he’s an advocate of properly attuned accommodations that help legitimately disabled people, but agreed the current system is leaving students unprepared for real life.
“I worry that a lot of the accommodations which are occurring are not helping students to become more functional members of society,” he said.
Private school students and wealthy parents have long been known to abuse diagnoses to get extra time on exams in high school and college, and even the SAT or ACT. Students need to provide documentation in order to be granted accommodations, but some families explicitly pursue diagnoses from doctors.
“I get requests for ADHD testing accommodations all the time,” clinical psychologist and Long Island University professor Dr. Camilo Ortiz told The Post. “Some parents are none too happy when I don’t agree the child has ADHD.”
A private school mom told The Post that “it’s not hyperbolic to say that almost everyone” is getting extra time at her daughter’s New York City high school. “They’re getting really creative with it — it’s ADHD, or anxiety, or depression that leads to migraines that supposedly disrupts the testing,” she said.
Wolfinger agrees parents — especially wealthy ones — will go to any lengths to give their kids an advantage.
“This is a world where people went to jail in order for their kids to go to fancy colleges,” he said, alluding to the Varsity Blues scandal that sent Lori Loughlin and other elites to jail for paying bribes to a college admissions tutor to help get their kids into top schools.
“People will stop at nothing to get their children advantages now. It strikes me as just one more example of how privilege gets entrenched and transmitted between generations.”
He also suspects that some less privileged students are also turning to accommodations because they aren’t necessarily cut out for college.
“I am very sympathetic to a critique that just too many young people pursue four-year degrees now,” he said.
“We might be better off in the long run if some of those students pursued two-year technical degrees or other opportunities.”
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