(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The far-left Atlantic admitted that Marxist educational policies designed to provide “each according to his needs” in elite universities were, in fact, lowering the bar and wreaking havoc in classrooms.
The article “Accommodation Nation,” published last week, acknowledged that a longstanding problem in the school system — student and parental abuse of so-called accommodations — was so widespread that the ostensible solution was becoming the source of a much greater problem.
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 percentSoon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving… pic.twitter.com/GEmr8Tw8Az
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) December 2, 2025
“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,” the article said.
Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago — once home to constitutional law professor Barack Obama — “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,” it said.
The shocking statistics revealed double-digit numbers of students at elite, Ivy League institutions now sought and demanded extra help for assignments and test-taking. That included 20% at Brown and Harvard universities, 34% at Amherst and nearly 40% at Stanford.
At one unidentified law school, 45% — nearly half of the future lawyers and judges who will be tasked with maintaining our sacred system of blind jurisprudence — identified as disabled.
The large majority of these disabilities result from mental issues such as ADHD, anxiety and depression — ailments that hardly existed in previous generations but have now presented clinical solutions for what once were considered character flaws.
“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” an anonymous professor told the Atlantic. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”
While the Americans with Disabilities Act has been around since the 1990s, a 2008 amendment by Obama and congressional Democrats broadened the definition of “disability” and asserted, for the first time, that students were protected by the ADA regardless of the impact of the so-called disabilities on their daily lives.
In turn, a cottage industry developed around diagnosing diseases based on dubious evidence, prescribing medications and forcing schools to provide specific accommodations for those disabilities.
“Many receive testing accommodations, extensions on take-home assignments, or permission to miss class” for minor mental-health issues, the Atlantic wrote. “… Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers.”
That included “a student at a public college in California [who] had permission to bring their mother to class,” said the article. “This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.”
Professors warned that the snowflake system was beginning to take a serious toll on the quality of students — and, hence, the quality of instruction.
“If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” said Steven Sloman, a Brown University professor of cognitive science. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”
Then again, many employers also now ask applicants if they identify as having an unspecified disability, presumably to give those candidates an inside track into hiring as a trade-off for tax incentives and quota fulfillment.
Professors studying the phenomenon have noted that the alarming trend is more pronounced at highly selective schools, where ambitious helicopter parents are likely to exert undue influence on the admissions process.
“It feels in some ways like a badge of honor,” said one special-education worker about affluent parents seeking extra benefits for their children. “People are all talking about getting their children evaluated now.”
Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, said only 3-4% of students at community colleges required accommodations, according to a study by the Department of Education.
Moreover, while traditional learning disabilities tended to follow students throughout their academic path, starting early in childhood, many students now claiming disabilities at four-year colleges only received their diagnosis after graduating from high school.
“Studies have found that a significant share of students exaggerate symptoms or don’t put in enough effort to get valid results on diagnostic tests,” the Atlantic wrote.
The culture of identity politics pushed by leftist media and social-media influencers likewise is leading some healthy young people, increasingly alienated by screen culture, to believe that they are missing out by not having a disability.
“It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” said Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
The same phenomenon may be contributing to the surge in young people who now identify as transgender or falling somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. Unscrupulous doctors and parents projecting onto them a belief that they suffer from gender dysmorphia has led some to undergo life-altering gender-transition surgery.
Meanwhile, so-called disability advocates, whose livelihood depends on having their services reach and ever-growing customer base, see no issue with letting a few healthy people game the system.
“I would rather open up access to the five kids who need accommodations but can’t afford documentation, and maybe there’s one person who has paid for an evaluation and they really don’t need it,” said Emily Tarconish, a special-education teaching assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “That’s worth it to me.”
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
