This should be a free read from
The Atlantic. If not then message me and I'll get you the text.
Accommodation Nation
Here is the conclusion...
"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."
