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My wife was born in Scarsdale, NY after her parents immigrated from Taiwan. In the 60s, her father was among the first Taiwanese Fulbright Scholars. But by the time Yahlin came around – the youngest of three girls – her parents had already realized their American Dream: an affluent suburban home with a swimming pool, several Mercedes Benzes, and plenty of TVs. In fact, with non-native-English-speaking parents, Yahlin claims she learned English from watching the great television dramas of the 1980s: Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest. That’s also how she learned she wanted to become a TV writer.
Unlike their mother, our three boys haven’t spent much time pondering who shot J.R. They’re more into Andor and Pluribus, with a proud nod to her shows when they air. And they spend more time with my family than hers. So I field occasional complaints about their lack of exposure to Chinese culture.
Last Christmas, I decided to do something about it. My present to Yahlin was tickets for us all to see Shen Yun. Billed as a “journey through millennia of traditional Chinese culture… [through] classical Chinese dance, picturesque backdrops, and stunning costumes,” I thought it would be good for the kids, or at least stop the grumbling. Little did I know that just a few weeks before the show, Yahlin would read a report on a lawsuit alleging that Shen Yun was abusing children, making “hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting young dancers… forcing them to work grueling hours and scaring them into thinking they’d face harm if they quit.” As this pushed literally all her buttons – her most recent TV show is The Handmaid’s Tale – she felt awful through the entire performance. As we exited Shen Yun, I sheepishly made the point that, if the allegations are true, it’s not an unfair representation of life under the Chinese Communist Party. So in terms of exposing the kids to Chinese culture, mission accomplished?
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. The same is true for students who want 50% more time to take exams, or extensions on assignments, or who obtain notes from doctors so professors don’t call on them without warning. There are a lot more of them than there used to be. And under the banner of equality, it’s making higher education even less equal.
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Over the past decade, the percentage of college students who qualify for accommodations due to disability has skyrocketed. At Harvard and Brown, it’s above 20%. At Amherst, it’s 34%. At Stanford, it’s 38%. Disabilities at University of Chicago have more than tripled in eight years. While the trend is most pronounced at highly selective institutions, it’s pervasive. The number of four-year private institutions with over 10% of students classified as disabled quadrupled from 2011 to 2022. Four-year publics increased seven-fold. In 2023, University of Virginia – which enrolls 18,000 undergrads – sent 21,527 accommodation letters to faculty.
The growth is not physical disabilities such as visual impairment or “kids in wheelchairs” as one professor told The Atlantic in a new article titled Accommodation Nation, but rather “more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression.” Who are all these additional students getting diagnosed with ADHD? A fair question given that DSM-5 criteria for ADHD requires symptoms before age 12. As one professor suggested to The Atlantic, “It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”
Can we be certain that most of these new non-physical disabilities aren’t legitimate? No, and conditions like autism are undeniably more prevalent among children and young adults. But Denison’s Robert Weis has found that most newly diagnosed college students have “above average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.” Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that while high school students with disabilities have been historically overrepresented at community colleges, the rate of community college students with disabilities has remained flat at 3-4% through the disability bull market. And half of disabled students at four-year colleges “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”
If privileged students and parents are going to great lengths to obtain extra time for a college course or set of courses, what happens when the stakes are even higher? Like in professional schools where the degree is required for licensure? The Law School Admissions Council, administrator of the LSAT, defines disability to include anxiety, depression, ADHD, and “executive functioning issues.” And between 2019 and 2023, requests for additional time on the LSAT increased 2.5x. These requests have led to significant extra time – minimum 50% more for ADHD, or 52.5 minutes per section instead of 35. Candidates who provide additional documentation can receive 70 minutes per section. LSAC reports that test-takers who receive additional time score 4-5 points higher than average.
As the LSAT suggests, just as there’s a disability step-up from high school to college, there’s also a step-up from college to law school. Once students start law school, where grades for mandatory first-year courses are determined by a single end-of-semester exam, accommodation is nearly the norm. I’ve spoken with law school leaders who estimate that 30% of their students receive accommodations. A 2025 article in University of Iowa’s Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice titled They Can’t All Have ADHD also cites the 30% level. And The Atlantic references a law school where 45% of students get extra time.
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After learning English from Dallas and Dynasty, my wife attended Scarsdale High School. With a college-like campus and college-level teachers, it’s a paragon of public school privilege. And now it’s also full of students with disabilities. In 2019, 20% of Scarsdale High students were classified as disabled and eligible for additional time on the SAT and ACT –a rate 7x the national average. According to The Atlantic, the disability process “usually starts when kids see that their peers have accommodations – or when they bring home their first B.” Getting classified is simple. One New York-based assessment service boasts “a 95 percent success rate in getting learning disability accommodations.”
Why have we become an Accommodation Nation? First, a culture of pathologizing behavior. As UT Austin’s Steven Mintz recently recounted, “On a recent flight, a small child in the row behind me shrieked with piercing intensity. The passenger beside me leaned over and whispered, with assurance, ‘He’s autistic.’” Mintz was less surprised at the kid’s behavior than at his seatmate’s rapid diagnosis: “We now default to pathology. Behaviors that earlier generations would have recognized as overtiredness, frustration, temperament, or physiological misery are now reframed as sensory processing issues, spectrum behaviors, and emotional dysregulation.” In education, Mount St. Joseph’s Richard Sparks who has researched learning disabilities for 40 years told the Chronicle of Higher Education that “the criteria for diagnosing these disabilities has gradually expanded.” It’s led to a conflation of academic struggles and time management challenges with disorders or disabilities. “At some point,” predicted Sparks, “everyone will have a disability.” It’s possible that everyone with a phone already has ADHD.
The second factor is a culture of competitiveness driven by scarcity, both real and perceived. It was on display in the Varsity Blues admissions scandal where – among other misdeeds – wealthy parents paid doctors for disability diagnoses so their kids could get extra time on the SAT and ACT. Because extra time on tests produces better scores and grades, and because obtaining a diagnosis can cost thousands of dollars, the accommodation tool is principally wielded by wealthy parents and students scrapping for every possible advantage. And for law school, it makes sense that where the stakes are higher, even more students will go to greater lengths to get an edge.
The third reason is higher education’s acquiescence. In response to the 2008 broadening of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) to include disabilities to “learning, reading, concentrating, thinking,” and to the American Psychiatric Association’s expanded definition of ADHD (“clear evidence of clinically significant impairment” became “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of functioning), the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) recommended that “universities put more weight on students' own accounts of their disability rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis.” According to AHEAD, “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.”
The deviance here is not a model of disability, but rather families gaming the system. Nevertheless, college's lenience may be setting up students to fail. Will law students who receive additional time on exams pass the bar? Bar exams have more stringent disability criteria. New York requires “recent medical documentation of [the] disability that is comprehensive” as well as “additional documentation supporting chronic ADHD symptoms beginning in childhood, even if the examinee was not diagnosed until adulthood.” Best estimates are accommodations for 5% of bar-exam-takers. Which means as many as 5 out of 6 law students who receive extra time during law school have no such advantage on the test that will determine whether they’ll be able to practice law and generate a return on their substantial investment. Those who don’t pass might fairly ask whether law school has pulled something of a bait-and-switch.
Beyond the bar exam lies the real world. How will law students who have received extra time perform as professionals? As a law professor friend of mine told me “once you get into legal practice, no client is going to say, sure, take twice as much time and bill me for it.” Furthermore, having atttended law school, students with ADHD who are only able to focus on topics they’re interested in might do well to avoid a legal career. Because they’re going to be presented with lots of uninteresting work. Be careful what you wish for.
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College disability services offices see their role, as JMU’s Alan Levinovitz described in the Chronicle of Higher Education, as “provider, not gatekeeper.” Levinovitz went on to write: “While researching this piece, multiple people refused to speak with me about their misgivings on the record. There is a chilling effect at work, resulting in a lopsided discussion…” College’s failure to play disability gatekeeper may not only be construed as bait-and-switch, or setting up students to fail – or giving privileged kids the false impression that they’re disadvantaged – but also a progressive impulse similar to those that landed it in political hot water this year.
Higher education’s maximally inclusive approach to disability is resulting in what University of Chicago physics professor Juan Collar calls “a two-speed student population.” As more privileged students obtain accommodations, elites are pulling even further ahead and inequality is growing, not shrinking – an ironic outcome of the ADA. Colleges and universities get in trouble when they cut themselves off from the real world. The next shoe to drop could be declaring disability at a common-sense-defying level that’s a multiple of the general population. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
2025 has been marked by unprecedented but discrete acts of defiance against higher education. Although the disability discrepancy has been overlooked so far, it’s a short-term, short-sighted strategy that’s destabilizing an already shaky system and undermining the ADA’s goal of providing accommodations for real disability. If colleges don’t stop simply taking privileged students (and their doctors or assessment services) at their word – if they don’t start applying critical thinking, or exactly the kind of scientific evidence that AHEAD rejects to distinguish real disabilities from behavior in the normal range – how much longer until this breakdown of rules-based order fans the flames of defiance into full-fledged Cultural Revolution against the colleges and law schools that educate our learning-disabled elites.