Garland Tucker writes for the Martin Center about unintended consequences linked to disability claims on college campuses.
Who would have ever guessed it? As many as one in three students at some elite colleges have been officially designated “disabled.” The Higher Education Research Institute’s 2016 American Freshman survey reports 21.9 percent of incoming freshmen nationwide have at least one disability. Aside from the laughable notion that so many ostensibly healthy college-age Americans are somehow disabled, there are serious policy and economic implications.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, colleges are obligated to accommodate disabled students. What does this mean? First, to be classified as “disabled” requires only a letter from a doctor. The student then makes a request to the college for special accommodation. Thousands of these requests have resulted in colleges spending millions of dollars for special testing centers, extended exam periods, soundproof testing rooms, etc. The biggest rise in disability requests involves mental health issues. Many colleges are forced to provide “low-stress testing centers,” which allow students suffering from mental health problems to walk around during exams and even to bring “comfort animals” into exams.
Serious questions about the fairness of these accommodations have arisen. Professor Ari Trachtenberg of Boston University in his 2016 article “ADA in the Classroom: Suitable Accommodation or Legalized Cheating?” questions the effect of routinely granting extra time on testing to a large proportion of the student population. He notes that colleges are ill-equipped to discern legitimate disability, which has led to wholesale granting of accommodations. He concludes, “Students without disabilities are potentially disadvantaged by these accommodations. It is inappropriate to give an objective test with a clearly delineated grading policy if some students get uncalibrated bonuses.” In addition, he argues that the intended beneficiaries of this legislation are actually being hurt. Disabled students are now receiving special accommodation in college that they will presumably not receive in the workplace.
