The question looks ridiculous, but mom went to class.
Need Extra Time? A Support Animal? A Private Room? Your Mom?
The Atlantic discusses the Accommodation Nation
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning. Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.
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.
Research confirms what intuition suggests: Extra time can confer an advantage to students who don’t have a disability. 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.
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.
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.
Frankly, this is ridiculous.
Colleges need to prepare students for the real world. And in the real world you cannot call on mom or get extra time.
Kids are over-diagnosed and over-pampered. If you have to bring mom to class, you don’t belong in college at all.
The need for mom is just one isolated case. But Brown and Harvard have more than 20 percent of undergraduates registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent.
That’s not isolated. It’s rampant fraud.
It happens because universities allow it to happen. And doctors allow it to happen. But it starts with Woke administrators actively encouraged this behavior in the name of fairness.
The same group that coddles these kids also promotes non-binary madness and men in women’s sports.
Three More Replies
The Average College Student Is Illiterate
In a 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 32% of 12th graders scored below the “basic” reading level, meaning they likely can’t identify supporting details in a text for literal comprehension.
A Persuasion article make the case The Average College Student Is Illiterate
I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be.
I teach at a regional public university in the United States. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
Reading
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.”
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.
This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer.
I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop.
What’s Changed?
- Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class.
- Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop out or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “Look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”
- They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones.
- It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones.
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down.
All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad.
The above is from Hilarius Bookbinder, the pseudonym for a tenured professor with an Ivy League PhD who writes Scriptorium Philosophia.
I know what HB is talking about. I have seen young adults sending texts to each other despite standing 3 feet apart. The preferred, and sometimes mandatory tool of conversation is a text.
How many people actually use the phone for talking instead of texting?
I just asked Chrome. “While precise, up-to-date figures are hard to pinpoint, surveys suggest a majority of smartphone users text more than they talk, with some studies indicating only about 43% of smartphone owners make calls, while over 70% use texting.”
And here’s an interesting fact. The number of documented Emotional Support Animals (ESAs) has risen dramatically, from around 65,000 in 2015 to over 240,000 in 2024, according to the National Service Animal Registry.
It’s phone addiction. It’s game addiction. It’s TikTok addiction. And it’s ADHD that stems from all of the preceding.
Oh wait, those are disabilities. Better call mom, get a note from the doctor, and demand more time for tests.
And one more thing. Teachers need a raise, especially Chicago teachers.
I will offer some suggestions in a follow-up post.
Related Posts
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Ability to Read, Write, or Do Math Is No Longer Required to Teach in New Jersey
Teachers’ unions prevail in New Jersey. Kids will suffer.
In Chicago There’s Under a 50 Percent Chance Police Show Up If You are Shot
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Addendum
One reader, an educator, said the article was BS.
A long-term follower on X says this:
Paul: Teacher here; college STEM class 6 years. Quit for reasons listed in this article. Reading/math skills = bad. The disabled list was the “get out of jail free cards.”
One guy missed 11 of the first 20 classes and somehow it was my fault. He had nothing wrong other than lazy.
Mish: Can both be correct?
About their own experiences, yes, but not in general.
Other readers, not educators, have similar experiences with Paul. The overall story may or may not be a bit hyped up to make a point, but it sure rings true in general.
And it’s amplified by other comments to this post.
