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

Summary

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. In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that's 34 percent. At Stanford University, it's a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus. A student with real cognitive struggles is much more likely to end up in community college, or not in higher education at all, right? The professors Horowitz interviewed largely back up this theory. "You hear 'students with disabilities' and it's not kids in wheelchairs," one professor told Horowitch. "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. Ironically, the very schools that cognitively challenged students are most likely to attend—community colleges—have far lower rates of disabled students, with only three to four percent of such students getting accommodations. To be fair, some of the students receiving these accommodations do need them. 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. While some students are no doubt seeking these accommodations as semi-conscious cheaters, I think most genuinely identify with the mental health condition they're usin...