No one is more skeptical of the accommodations system than the academics who study it. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, pointed me to a Department of Education study that found that middle and high schoolers with disabilities tend to have below-average reading and math skills. These students are half as likely to enroll in a four-year institution as students without disabilities and twice as likely to attend a two-year or community college. If the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so called Ivy Plus schools.
In fact, the opposite appears to be true. According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years. He and his co-authors found that students with learning disabilities who request accommodations at community colleges “tend to have histories of academic problems beginning in childhood” and evidence of ongoing impairment. At four-year institutions, by contrast, about half of these students “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”
No one can say precisely how many students should qualify for accommodations. The higher prevalence at more selective institutions could reflect the fact that wealthy families and well-resourced schools are better positioned to get students with disabilities the help they need. Even with the lowered bar for a diagnosis, obtaining one can cost thousands of dollars. And as more students with disabilities get help in middle and high school, that could at least partially explain their enrollment at top colleges.
Still, 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. When Weis and his colleagues looked at how students receiving accommodations for learning disabilities at a selective liberal-arts school performed on reading, math, and IQ tests, most had above-average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.
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