2025-12-02XQuote

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Academic “accommodations” have rapidly, insanely morphed from accessibility to arbitrage. The US has built a system where ordinary stress, distraction, or a B+ in college gets medicalized, and then also buys a student extra time and softer rules. This idiocy rewards self-narrated fragility, disadvantages anyone who plays it straight, and makes life harder for students with serious, real disabilities who now look like part of a hustle. The net result is a cohort of high-privilege students who are simultaneously entitled and infantilized, and then are shocked to discover the rest of the world doesn’t run on "extensions" and excuses. Bad for everyone. Just let the kid who deserves a B get a B.

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This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics. - At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled - At Amherst: more than 30 percent - At Stanford: nearly 40 percent Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago." As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability—extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc—the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded. America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.
DKThomp ↗