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Across campus, faculty members scramble to identify vacant offices and classrooms for hundreds of other students who need a distraction-reduced setting or extra time for the exam. Each of these improvised testing spots needs a proctor, which can stretch departments that have lost teaching assistants to budget cuts.
About 15 percent of the university’s 12,000 undergraduates have been approved for some kind of disability accommodation, many of them for challenges related to anxiety, depression, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), and other mental-health diagnoses, said Scott Lapinski, executive director of health and well-being. Sixty-four students have five or more disabilities.
“I’ve been in faculty meetings where the sheer volume of accommodation requests is overwhelming,” said Andrew Houtenville, an economics professor and director of the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.
Lapinski understands why the arrangements can be taxing for some faculty and staff members, especially during midterms and finals. Still he tells them, “So many students tell us, ‘I wouldn’t have made it through without these accommodations.’”
There’s a growing perception among faculty members and in the mainstream press that many students are exploiting the disability system to get an unfair edge and that the accommodations they’re getting are leaving them less prepared for the challenges they’ll face after graduation.
The reality is far more complicated. While some students are clearly taking advantage of it, experts and sources who’ve tried to navigate the system say expensive and time-consuming reporting requirements are keeping many others from getting the services they need. Disability staff are overwhelmed on many campuses, experiencing rapid turnover and struggling to meet the needs of many students with complex, intersecting needs.
There’s little recourse for students who feel they’ve been unfairly denied services. With or without modifications, students with disabilities are far less likely to graduate.
The questions about who deserves accommodations have left students with disabilities and their advocates worried that skepticism and mistrust could erode the progress they’ve made in gaining equal access to higher education.
I know this happens. But it’s not the norm that people are scamming the system.
“I’m not naïve; I know this happens. But it’s not the norm that people are scamming the system,” said Wendy S. Harbour, director of the National Center for College Students With Disabilities at the University of Minnesota.
“So many students are calling us in crisis. They can’t get accommodations, or faculty are refusing to implement them,” said Harbour, who is deaf. That problem is worsened, she said, when people think students “are probably just faking.”
“Some of these trends are due to increased diagnoses,” as well as the anxiety and self-doubt that has been widely documented among today’s young people, said Houtenville. “But it’s also due to increased self-advocacy.” Students are more skilled today, he said, “at fighting for their needs to be met.”
In December, The Atlantic published an article, “Accommodation Nation,” that describes, citing data and anecdotes, how students at elite colleges were getting questionable diagnoses of disability that allowed them to receive extra time on tests and assignments. A few weeks later, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) issued a statement objecting to those conclusions.
“Ultimately, misinformation about accommodations can perpetuate stereotypes and fuel discrimination,” the statement read. “For decades, students with invisible disabilities were denied support because their struggles were dismissed as laziness or lack of effort. The rise in accommodations reflects a cultural shift toward acknowledging mental health, not a decline in academic integrity.”
The Atlantic piece was followed by coverage in other national media outlets questioning whether the accommodations process had run amok. A Stanford University student even boasted in a campus newspaper that she had “gamed” the disability system to score a single room, telling her classmates they’d be “stupid” not to do the same. (A Stanford spokesperson said the 40-percent disability figure that was widely reported for the university included all students who filled out an intake form with the disability office, but far fewer — 24 percent — ended up with accommodations in the fall quarter.)
“This fear that people with disabilities are ‘trying to get something that I don’t get’ frames things as us versus them when it doesn’t have to be,” said Katie York, who has ADHD and autism and serves as a staff adviser to a student neurodiversity club at the Community College of Baltimore County’s Dundalk campus.
This fear that people with disabilities are ‘trying to get something that I don’t get’ frames things as us versus them when it doesn’t have to be.
In fact, many students who qualify for accommodations don’t ask for them, said Jenifer Shaud, a doctoral student at Michigan Technological University who studies how students with disabilities persist and perform in college. She said that’s one reason their graduation rates are lower than average. Only a third of students with disabilities who enroll in four-year undergraduate programs graduate within eight years, according to a report published last year by the Public Library of Science. Among students over all, almost two thirds graduate from those programs within six years.
Shaud said no one questions why, on a snowy day, she pulls into a reserved parking spot near a classroom building with a ramp she can navigate in her wheelchair. But students with mental-health or learning disorders who she’s interviewed find it harder to explain to someone who asks why they might need extra time on a test.
In the K-12 system, parents and teachers largely handle the accommodations. In college, it’s up to the students.
Many college disability offices require documentation that’s less than three years old and won’t accept a diagnosis a student received as a freshman or sophomore in high school. “Testing can run into the thousands of dollars, and health insurance often doesn’t cover it,” Harbour said.
Collecting the required paperwork, meeting with the disability office, and following up with each individual professor “is a lot of work — especially for a 17- or 18-year-old in their first semester who has problems with executive function,” said Shaud. Some decide it’s not worth the trouble.
Her daughter’s primary-care doctor concluded that since she’d graduated near the top of her high-school class, she didn’t need the referral that Eisaman was seeking for an ADHD or autism diagnosis.
“They didn’t see the anxiety and sleepless nights and vomiting, or the absolutely rigid routine we had to create for her,” Eisaman said. “It all fell apart when she went to college.”
For three years, she and her daughter tried to find a doctor who would evaluate her, but they were either booked or didn’t take her insurance. Maybe rich kids in Ivy League colleges are finding ways to fake a disability, Eisaman said, but “for those of us who live in the middle of cornfields, students aren’t going to go through all that trouble.”
Jessica Chaikof, a doctoral student at Brandeis University, suffers from a genetic condition, Usher syndrome, that causes hearing and vision loss and can affect balance. Chaikof, who also has a learning disability, has had to spend weeks collecting documents from an audiologist, a retinal specialist, and a neuropsychiatrist.
During her undergraduate years at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts, frequent turnover in the disability office meant her requests for live captioning and note takers kept getting dropped, she said. As a graduate student at American University, she struggled to hear a professor with a thick accent whose voice was also muffled by the mask he wore during the pandemic.
When students are denied services they feel they’re legally entitled to, they can, in theory, turn to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. In 2008, Congress amended the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act to clarify and broaden the definition of disability and make it easier for people to seek protection under the ADA.
That avenue is all but closed today, several disability-rights activists said. Last year, the U.S. education secretary, Linda McMahon, fired more than 240 OCR employees, nearly 40 percent of the staff. A report released in April by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent, says the office had reached resolution agreements in only 1.4 percent of the 5,794 pending disability cases last year.
Robert E. Maleczka Jr., a professor of chemistry at Michigan State University, said he knows not to question why someone needs an accommodation. When faculty receive letters spelling out what services are needed, those letters don’t reveal diagnoses or medical information to protect student privacy.
“You could be accused of violating some antidiscrimination policy when you’re just trying to learn why this person needs 100 percent more time,” he said.
When his department has to find less-distracting rooms for students, it isn’t always clear what qualifies. “If you have a room that accommodates 30 and only 10 are there, is that quiet enough?” he said.
To respond to the dozen or so students needing extra time on assignments, he gives everyone until 11:59 p.m. the night before the final exam to turn them in. A number of students told him on their course evaluations that they wished he’d held them to earlier deadlines “to keep them honest,” Maleczka said.
The fact that not all students with a clinical condition are able to get a diagnosis means professors don’t always know who really needs accommodations and who might just need another kind of support.
Alan Levinovitz, a professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University, argued that when students assume there’s a medical explanation for their academic troubles, they’re more likely to underestimate what they’re capable of.
He cited the example of a student who told him her anxiety disorder would cause her to pass out if she had to make a public presentation. Other professors had allowed her to videotape her presentations.
Levinovitz asked if she’d ever been coached in public speaking, watched a YouTube video on the subject, or practiced with a professor beforehand. She said she hadn’t, so he practiced with her and she was able to present in class. “Had she been given an official anxiety diagnosis, she would have forced my hand into giving her an accommodation,” he said.
He learned how sensitive the issue can be within disability circles after The Chronicle published an essay he wrote suggesting colleges were making the system less equitable by granting too many accommodations.
“Many people in the advocacy and disability community were furious,” he said in an interview. “They said bringing up exceptional cases of either disability fraud or misdiagnosis will embolden skeptics of disability rights in general and give them the ammunition they need to start to deny the accommodations that allowed them to get education.”
That may be true, he added. “There are bad actors.” But, he said, “we don’t do anyone any favors by hiding that information.”
Looking back, he agrees with his critics that he should have included the voices of more people with disabilities in his essay. A small minority of the group thanked him for writing it, he said, because “they felt that the expansion of diagnosed categories made it easier for people to dismiss serious disabilities.”
Some faculty members also worry that giving certain students more time on tests will compromise academic standards, as well as the student’s ability to meet deadlines in their careers.
Most employers are legally required to make reasonable modifications to the work environment for workers who are disabled. Besides, said Houtenville, the New Hampshire economics professor, “there are very few times where a boss sits on top of you and says you have something to do in an hour and you can’t use reference materials.”
He disagrees with colleagues who consider performing under time pressure a measure of competence. “I care more about whether they learn the material than how fast they can do it.”
Both Lapinski and Houtenville are big promoters of universal design, an approach meant to make classroom spaces welcoming and accessible to everyone. Classrooms could include automatic door openers and be painted in subdued colors that avoid sensory overload. Universal design for learning could include courses with flexible deadlines. Teaching strategies might include setting clearer goals for a course, sharing notes and summaries, providing breaks, and connecting students with tutoring and counseling services.
If a student doesn’t meet the threshold for modified services, she might benefit from extra math tutoring, time-management workshops, or counseling sessions, Lapinski said. When it comes to accommodations, “if they’re not legally qualified, we’re not going to approve them,” but students won’t be turned away, he added.
“I hope the narrative changes from blaming students for people’s frustrations to how do we create a system that’s more inclusive for everyone.”
