Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. How did they become another way for wealthy students to gain an advantage?
By Rose HorowitchDecember 2, 2025, 7 AM ET
Illustration by Ben Hickey
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.
Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.
The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.
“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.
Forty years ago, students with disabilities could count on few protections in higher education. Federal law prohibited discrimination against disabled students, but in practice schools did little to address their needs. Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights expert who teaches at Harvard Law, recalled the challenges of attending law school as a student using a wheelchair in the 1980s. “I sat in the back of the classroom, could not enter certain buildings in a normal way, became the first person on the law review with a disability, and dragged myself up the stairs,” he told me.
The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, was meant to make life fairer for people like Stein. The law required public and private institutions to provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”
Change was slow at first, in part because Supreme Court rulings narrowed the scope of the law. Professors I spoke with told me that, even in the early 2000s, they taught only a handful of students with disabilities. Then, in 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the law’s original intent. The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. It also included a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by a disability (“learning, reading, concentrating, thinking,” among others) and clarified that individuals were protected under the ADA even if their impairment didn’t severely restrict their daily life.
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In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. “Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual’s history and experience with disability and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations,” AHEAD wrote.
Schools began relaxing their requirements. A 2013 analysis of disability offices at 200 postsecondary institutions found that most “required little” from a student besides a doctor’s note in order to grant accommodations for ADHD. At the same time, getting such a note became easier. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.
Recently, mental-health issues have joined ADHD as a primary driver of the accommodations boom. Over the past decade, the number of young people diagnosed with depression or anxiety has exploded. L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator at Ohio State University, told me that 36 percent of the students registered with OSU’s disability office have accommodations for mental-health issues, making them the largest group of students his office serves. Many receive testing accommodations, extensions on take-home assignments, or permission to miss class. Students at Carnegie Mellon University whose severe anxiety makes concentration difficult might get extra time on tests or permission to record class sessions, Catherine Samuel, the school’s director of disability resources, told me. Students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning.
The types of accommodations vary widely. Some are uncontroversial, such as universities outfitting buildings with ramps and providing course materials in braille. These allow disabled students to access the same opportunities as their classmates. Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.
Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
Professors told me that the most common—and most contentious—accommodation is the granting of extra time on exams. For students with learning disabilities, the extra time may be necessary to complete the test. But unlike a wheelchair ramp, this kind of accommodation can be exploited. Research confirms what intuition suggests: Extra time can confer an advantage to students who don’t have a disability.
Read: The time crunch on standardized tests is unnecessary
Complicating matters is the fact that the line between having a learning or psychological disability and struggling with challenging coursework is not always clearly defined. Having ADHD or anxiety, for example, might make it difficult to focus. But focusing is a skill that the educational system is designed to test. Some professors see the current accommodations regime as propping up students who shouldn’t have perfect scores. “If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”
No one is more skeptical of the accommodations system than the academics who study it. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, pointed me to a Department of Education study that found that middle and high schoolers with disabilities tend to have below-average reading and math skills. These students are half as likely to enroll in a four-year institution as students without disabilities and twice as likely to attend a two-year or community college. If the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so called Ivy Plus schools.
In fact, the opposite appears to be true. According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years. He and his co-authors found that students with learning disabilities who request accommodations at community colleges “tend to have histories of academic problems beginning in childhood” and evidence of ongoing impairment. At four-year institutions, by contrast, about half of these students “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”
No one can say precisely how many students should qualify for accommodations. The higher prevalence at more selective institutions could reflect the fact that wealthy families and well-resourced schools are better positioned to get students with disabilities the help they need. Even with the lowered bar for a diagnosis, obtaining one can cost thousands of dollars. And as more students with disabilities get help in middle and high school, that could at least partially explain their enrollment at top colleges.
Still, some students are clearly taking advantage of an easily gamed system. The Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal showed that there are wealthy parents who are willing to pay unscrupulous doctors to provide disability diagnoses to their nondisabled children, securing them extra time on standardized tests. 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. When Weis and his colleagues looked at how students receiving accommodations for learning disabilities at a selective liberal-arts school performed on reading, math, and IQ tests, most had above-average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.
A parent in Scarsdale, New York, who works in special education told me that it’s become common for parents of honors students to get their kids evaluated so they can have extra time on tests. The process usually starts when kids see that their peers have accommodations— or when they bring home their first B. “It feels in some ways like a badge of honor,” she said. “People are all talking about getting their children evaluated now.” In 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that one in five Scarsdale High School students was considered disabled and eligible for accommodations on college entrance exams—a rate more than seven times higher than the national average.
Several of the college students I spoke with for this story said they knew someone who had obtained a dubious diagnosis. Hailey Strickler, a senior at the University of Richmond, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia when she was 7 years old. She was embarrassed about her disabilities and wary of getting accommodations, until her sophomore year of college. She was speaking with a friend, who didn’t have a disability but had received extra time anyway. “They were like, ‘If I’m doing that, you should definitely have the disability accommodations,’” Strickler told me.
“We know that people will act as they are incentivized to act,” Brian Scholl, a Yale psychology and cognitive-science professor, told me. “And the students are absolutely incentivized to have as much extra accommodations as they can under any circumstances.” Students who receive extra time on the LSAT, for example, earn higher average scores than students who don’t.
Even if students aren’t consciously trying to gain an unfair edge, some seem to have convinced themselves that they need extra help. Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told me that the fastest-growing group of students who come to him seems to be those who have done their own research and believe that a disability is the source of their academic or emotional challenges. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” Lindstrom said. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
Lindstrom worries that the system encourages students to see themselves as less capable than they actually are. By attributing all of their difficulties to a disability, they are pathologizing normal challenges. “When it comes to a disorder like ADHD, we all have those symptoms sometimes,” Lindstrom told me. “But most of us aren’t impaired by them.”
One recent Stanford graduate told me that when she got mononucleosis as a freshman, she turned to the disability office: Because she couldn’t exercise, she was struggling to focus in class. Though she’d always been fidgety, she’d never had academic issues in high school—but high school had been easier than Stanford. The office suggested that she might have ADHD, and encouraged her to seek a diagnosis. A psychiatrist and her pediatrician diagnosed her with ADHD and dyslexia, and Stanford granted her extra time on tests, among other accommodations.
Collar, the University of Chicago physics professor, said that part of what his exams are designed to assess is the ability to solve problems in a certain amount of time. But now many of his students are in a separate room, with time and a half or even double the allotted time to complete the test. “I feel for the students who are not taking advantage of this,” he told me. “We have a two-speed student population.”
Most of the disability advocates I spoke with are more troubled by the students who are still not getting the accommodations they need than by the risk of people exploiting the system. They argue that fraud is rare, and stress that some universities maintain stringent documentation requirements. “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,” Emily Tarconish, a special-education teaching-assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. “That’s worth it to me.”
Tarconish sees the growing number of students receiving accommodations as evidence that the system is working. Ella Callow, the assistant vice chancellor of disability rights at Berkeley, had a similar perspective. “I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up,” she told me. “Disabled people still are deeply underemployed in this country and too often live in poverty. The key to addressing that is in large part through institutions like Berkeley that make it part of our mission to lift people into security.” (One-third of the students registered with Berkeley’s disability office are from low-income families.) At the University of Chicago, members of a committee to address the surge in accommodations don’t even agree on whether a problem exists, Collar told me.
The surge itself is undeniable. Soon, some schools may have more students receiving accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.
Mark Schneider, the former head of the educational-research arm of the Department of Education, told me that three of his four grandkids have “individualized education programs,” the term of art for accommodations at the K–12 level. “The reward for saying that you have a disability, versus the stigma—the balance between those two things has so radically changed,” he said. Were it not for that shift, he added, his grandchildren may not be receiving benefits and services they need. But at the very least, the rewards are not evenly distributed. As more elite students get accommodations, the system worsens the problem it was designed to solve. The ADA was supposed to make college more equitable. Instead, accommodations have become another way for the most privileged students to press their advantage.
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