The number of college students receiving disability accommodations has surged over the past decade. At Stanford University, 38 percent of students were registered with the university’s disability office in fall of 2023, up from 13 percent a decade before, according to the most recent national education data. At Harvard University, that number was 21 percent, up from less than 3 percent in 2013.
These striking increases have raised eyebrows, and the issue made national news in February when Stanford junior Elsa Johnson wrote an article in The Times in which she claimed that many Stanford students—including herself—are abusing the disability system. Her article sparked debate over whether expanding accommodations are leveling the playing field for students with disabilities or creating a two-tiered system which unfairly rewards those willing to game it.
Before the 1990s, people with severe disabilities, such as paralysis or blindness, often struggled to access higher education, because solutions like wheelchair ramps and textbooks written in braille were relatively rare. Then, in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, which required schools to make campus accessible for people with a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” This law changed the landscape for those with severe disabilities. “The ADA had a huge impact on my life,” says Dr. Regina Nuzzo, who is a professor of mathematics at Gallaudet University and is hearing impaired. “Finally I had access to information I physically couldn’t get before,” she says. “Thanks to closed captions, I could buy a device and actually watch the news on TV.”
At first, the ADA was applied strictly. For example, someone with depression that was intermittent and sometimes controlled by medication might not have qualified. But in 2008 the law was amended to expand what counts as a disability. This broadening was intended to improve accessibility for people with less visible disabilities, and undoubtedly has made it easier for people with disabilities to get the help they need. But it also blurred the lines between a disability and the normal challenges of life that most people face. Disabilities now encompass everything from anxiety to gluten intolerance to night terrors, according to Johnson, who is the editor-in-chief of the conservative publication, The Stanford Review.
Students registering with the disability office at Stanford can receive all sorts of perks, including extra time on tests, private test-taking rooms, and single dorm rooms. This creates an incentive for students to exaggerate their needs, especially when they see others getting ahead by exploiting the system. “Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice,” Johnson writes in The Times. “The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not claiming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.”
Indeed, the rise in accommodations is much more pronounced at elite universities that serve wealthier students than at less selective schools, suggesting that some families may view accommodations as one more advantage that they should be able to buy for their children. “You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” says an anonymous professor in a 2025 article in The Atlantic. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.”
Disability advocates counter that the expansion in accommodations is a sign of progress, driven in part by declining stigma around less obvious disabilities, particularly mental health issues. “I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up,” says Ella Callow, assistant vice chancellor for disability rights at University of California, Berkeley, in the 2025 article in The Atlantic. Advocates like her believe that cheating the system is rare and that the bigger problem is that many students who need support still aren’t receiving it. In the same article, Emily Tarconish, special education teacher at the University of Illinois, says, “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…That’s worth it to me.”
But Nuzzo worries that expanding accommodations is actually harming the disability community. “I think the definition of ‘disabled’ has expanded so far that it’s now almost meaningless,” she says. “I worry that people will soon no longer take me and my disability seriously.” She argues that widening the definition of disability too far, to include even relatively minor life challenges, is fueling backlash against the disability community. “They see the grifters, not the people like me who have a severe physical impairment but who still work extra hard just to keep up.”
She also worries that when one in three Stanford students is receiving accommodations, we’re not preparing them for the real world. “Who doesn’t want extended time on everything? But the world doesn’t work that way. If I don’t file my taxes on time, the government doesn’t care if I have a disability.”
