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Thirty-eight percent.

That’s the share of Stanford undergraduates who now identify as disabled. At Brown and Harvard, it’s north of 20 percent. At UMass Amherst, 34 percent.

If you haven’t heard, a large and growing number of students at elite colleges are claiming to have disabilities to secure accommodations that range from the academic to the luxurious.

This controversy has simmered for years, but it boiled over late last year when the Atlantic published “Accommodation Nation,” exposing the surge in disability registrations at selective schools. The piece documented sharp increases in students qualifying for perks—most commonly extra time on exams—often for dubious conditions. At Stanford, for example, students can cite “night terrors” to obtain private dorm rooms or claim social anxiety to avoid class participation.

Does this surprise me? No.

I attended the University of Southern Mississippi, where a bubble wrap room was set up during midterms and finals so students could pop plastic to relieve “test anxiety.” I’m also not surprised because we have long chronicled the rise of student coddling and the parallel collapse of academic standards. Even elite colleges and universities now devote substantial resources to remediation—Harvard now offers scaled-back math courses for students who arrive without basic algebra and geometry.

Universities, to be fair, did not invent this climate out of thin air. They are complying with a legal and psychological regime that has steadily widened the category of disability and weakened the standard for accommodation.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required “reasonable accommodations” for impairments that “substantially limit” major life activities. Courts once read that language narrowly, but in 2008, Congress amended the definition through the ADA Amendments Act, explicitly adding learning, reading, concentrating, and thinking to the list of protected major life activities. This forced schools to place greater trust in students’ self-reports rather than demanding exhaustive medical documentation. At the same time, diagnostic criteria loosened: ADHD, anxiety, and depression diagnoses surged dramatically.

Accommodations are now common and routinely include extended testing time, separate exam rooms, flexible deadlines, excused absences, single dorm rooms, and emotional-support animals. (In Chapel Hill, emotional-support dogs are nearly as common as the LGBTQ-allied coffee shops—bright vests and rainbow flags everywhere, “All are welcome here… but you can’t pet the dog.”)

Among the long list of possible accommodations, extra time seems to be the most corrosive. As Rich Cohen wrote in the Wall Street Journal, time is not merely part of the test—it is the test. Performance under real constraints is what separates genuine mastery from mediocrity, he argues. Yet elite institutions are certifying large numbers of graduates who have been exempted from timed conditions, with no indication on their transcripts that their standards were adjusted.

What I find most frustrating, however, is that these accommodations are concentrated among the students who need them least. Public two-year colleges, for example, report disability-accommodation rates of only three to four percent—a number that has remained consistent for more than a decade. But at elite universities, the share of students receiving accommodations can exceed 30 percent.

That pattern does not suggest that elite universities have heroically expanded access for disabled students, nor that their students are uniquely impaired. It suggests, instead, that those who populate elite campuses are uniquely positioned to rig—and in many cases exploit—the accommodation system. That reality demands a reckoning over what elite degrees actually signal. If students move through academia on easy mode, their degrees should not be treated as proof of superior intelligence, greater capability, or unusual discipline.

Some may decline to blame students for taking advantage of a permissive system. I do not. But whether one assigns fault to students or not, reform cannot depend on their restraint. As long as Congress maintains an expansive definition of disability and universities face serious legal risk for denial, accommodations will continue to proliferate.

Rolling back the Accommodation Nation will require congressional action—action lawmakers should seriously consider.

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