Why Are 38 Percent of Stanford Students Saying They’re Disabled?

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 using to get extra time on tests. Over the past few years, there’s been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker. Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told Horowitch that he sees a growing number of students with this perspective. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” Lindstrom told her. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.” 

What’s driving this trend? Well, the way conditions like ADHD, autism, and anxiety get talked about online—the place where most young people first learn about these conditions—is probably a contributing factor. Online creators tend to paint a very broad picture of the conditions they describe. A quick scroll of TikTok reveals creators labeling everything from always wearing headphones, to being bad at managing your time, to doodling in class as a sign that someone may have a diagnosable condition. According to these videos, who isn’t disabled? 

The result is a deeply distorted view of “normal.” If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD, the implication is that a “normal,” nondisabled person has essentially no problems. A “neurotypical” person, the thinking goes, can churn out a 15-page paper with no hint of procrastination, maintain perfect focus during a boring lecture, and never experience social anxiety or awkwardness. This view is buffeted by the current way many of these conditions are diagnosed. As Horowitch points out, when the latest issue of the DSM, the manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients, was released in 2013, it significantly lowered the bar for an ADHD diagnosis. When the definition of these conditions is set so liberally, it’s easy to imagine a highly intelligent Stanford student becoming convinced that any sign of academic struggle proves they’re learning disabled, and any problems making friends are a sign they have autism. 

Risk-aversion, too, seems like a compelling factor driving bright students to claim learning disabilities. Our nation’s most promising students are also its least assured. So afraid of failure—of bad grades, of a poorly-received essay—they take any sign of struggle as a diagnosable condition. A few decades ago, a student who entered college and found the material harder to master and their time less easily managed than in high school would have been seen as relatively normal. Now, every time she picks up her phone, a barrage of influencers is clamoring to tell her this is a sign she has ADHD. Discomfort and difficulty are no longer perceived as typical parts of growing up.

In this context, it’s easy to read the rise of academic accommodations among the nation’s most intelligent students as yet another manifestation of the risk-aversion endemic in the striving children of the upper middle class. For most of the elite-college students who receive them, academic accommodations are a protection against failure and self-doubt. Unnecessary accommodations are a two-front form of cheating—they give you an unjust leg-up on your fellow students, but they also allow you to cheat yourself out of genuine intellectual growth. If you mask learning deficiencies with extra time on texts, soothe social anxiety by forgoing presentations, and neglect time management skills with deadline extensions, you might forge a path to better grades. But you’ll also find yourself less capable of tackling the challenges of adult life.