Why Are So Many College Students Identifying as Disabled?
Education Outrage Du Jour
On November 19th, Rose Horowitch wrote an excellent piece for the Atlantic about unprepared college students.
But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
Yesterday, Horowitch followed up with another education outrage article — Accommodation Nation: America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem. This article totally misses the mark.
Let’s start off with her lede:
Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.
I am eyerolling big time. Professors struggling!!! Oh boo-hoo. All accommodations happen through the Office of Disability Services. The professor just has to send the test to the office, and their proctors do the rest. Is that super hard?
Horowitz doesn’t really seem to understand the process. Did she interview disability advocates, parents, or disability college consultants for this article? I think not. So, let me rewrite her article.
What is the Office of Disability Services?
Every college — both four-year and two-year colleges — has an office that provides basic accommodations for students with disabilities. The name of this department varies from school to school. At Rutgers, it’s called The Office of Disability Services. At NYU, it’s called The Moses Center for Student Accessibility (CSA). At Marist, it’s the Office of Accommodations and Accessibility.
To receive services from the Office of Disability Services, students must fill out a lengthy application and include documentation about their disability from their high school or a doctor. If they are approved, then the student is interviewed by administrators in the office. In other words, the college doesn’t make it easy to get this help.
In fact, the process for getting accommodations is so rigorous and in parent-free zones that I know several students with disabilities who couldn’t make it through that gauntlet. In some cases, this Office becomes a screening tool to weed out students with disabilities.
To receive any help from this department, the student must first be admitted to the college. They have to have the same grades, test scores, and recommendations as every other student. Students who have registered with the Office of Disability Services do not have intellectual disabilities. They are equally as smart, but need very small accommodations in order to be evaluated fairly.
What Are the Accommodations?
If approved for services, students are given a menu of accommodations, which, by K-12 standards, are extremely paltry. When kids are in public school, they are protected by IDEA, which enables students with all sorts of disabilities to attend public school.
However, IDEA ends when the student leaves public education. In college, students are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is much less rigorous. Briefly, all students are entitled to a public education, but not a college education.
The typical accommodations that colleges provide students without a physical disability are extra time on tests and a quiet room. Professors do NOT change the content of their classes. Professors have no special training on neurodiversity or inclusion. Actually, they have no training in pedagogy either, but that’s a topic for another day. Students are expected to be able to sit in a class for 1 to 3 hours, pay attention, not walk around, not stim, not ask excessive questions, and not bother the other students.
In other words, those college accommodations aren’t major. They don’t give disabled students a big edge over other students. Honestly, we need more accommodations and more special programs for kids with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. With the basic accommodations, not enough of those students graduate from college.
More Hurdles
Students are responsible for getting their own accommodations. After that initial screening process, the disability office sends them a “Letter of Accommodations.” Students must forward this letter to all of their professors at the beginning of the school year. Before each exam, they must remind the professor to send their exams to the special office. For students with an executive function disability, these extra steps become another barrier to education.
Many students register for disability services, but then never take advantage of the accommodations, because they are too much of a hassle. Other parents hire consultants to teach their students how to manage these accommodations. Others hire private tutors and executive function coaches to work with their students over Zoom.
I always advise parents to have their students take advantage of Disability Support services. When done right, for the right kid, that extra help is valuable. But it’s not a game-changer. That’s why more and more college programs are cropping up all over the country that are geared towards kids with more serious disabilities. (As part of my day job, I provide college advice to families with children with autism.)
Why has the Disability Rate in Colleges Increased?
Yes, the number of students registering with the Office of Disability Services on their college campus has skyrocketed.
The Chicago Maroon reported, “During the 2017-18 school year, roughly 600 students were registered with SDS for accommodations, while by the 2024-25 school year, more than 2,460 students—13 percent of the student population—were registered with SDS. In her Atlantic article, Horowitz has similar data from Stanford and other elite schools.
There are many reasons for the increasing disability rate that have nothing to do with rich parents working the system.
Parents and young people are increasingly “woke” about their disabilities. In late-night scrolling fests on Instagram and TikTok, I always stumble upon videos of beautiful young people identifying as ADHD or autistic or possibly both. If your favorite influencer is autistic, then you want to be autistic, too. The stigma is gone.
For various reasons, young people are being trained to be open about their disabilities. To get accommodations in school and the workplace, they have to self-identify. I’ve trained parents on how they should help their students with self-identification.
More people with disabilities are surviving public education and have the necessary skills to attend college. A good thing.
Parents are learning from each other and disability consultants about how to nudge their students to sign up for these services.
Colleges are run by very nice, left-leaning administrators who want to increase rates of inclusion and may be getting some grant money to provide additional services and programs.
Education Outrage
Two things are true at the same time:
Standards for education have dropped, resulting in the recent crop of college students who are unprepared for a traditional college curriculum and require remedial help.
More college students are self-identifying as having a disability and registering with the Office of Disability Services on campus for accommodations.
The first issue — declining standards — is a real problem. The second issue — rising rates of disabilities — is not a real problem.
Earlier in the week, I cheered on the recent attention to education policy. I am modifying my thoughts. I’m okay with education outrage, but let’s target the right people and the right problems.
Disclaimer: I wrote this before work. Typos abound.
Thanks for covering this topic, Laura (even if you had to hustle to finish it in the morning!). When I was a professor, I was quite willing to accommodate students' special needs. Of course, my half of the courses that I taught were for people who wanted to become special education teachers; it would have been a bit hypocritical not to do so!
Some of your readers might benefit from knowing that there is a professional organization focused on disabilities in colleges and universities. It is known as AHEAD—the Association for Higher Education and Disability (https://ahead.org). It provides good info about the topic in general (but it's not about specific services for any one individual).
Good article, I think that disorders like autism and ADHD are more prevalent than we used to acknowledge. But I think social media produces people who falsely claim to have these disorders is increasing. But most are actually disabled and the accommodations for them who qualify as disabled is mostly good. But the other trend of unqualified students who can’t do math or complain when they have to do work is unacceptable. Testing and passing standards need to be rigorous and I think the high schools need to be part of the solution for our drop in math competency.