7 ms·

> the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor's note. Isn'

• bluefirebrand 11mo ago
  It is probably not good if nearly half (38% qualifies as nearly half, right?) of students are considered disabled and needing accommodations, right? Surely nearly half of any given public population can't be disabled?
  • cynicalpeace 11mo ago
    They're quite obviously not. They're lying so they can get unlimited time on the test and/or look at their phone. They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage!
    • bluefirebrand 11mo ago
      Right. What I'm saying is that we've probably screwed up by creating a system that incentivizes people to "be disabled" even if they really are stretching the definition of disabled
      • skywhopper 11mo ago
        I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
        • bluefirebrand 11mo ago
          I don't think you understand my position and you're certainly reading tone I didn't intend into my words I am nearsighted, I am ADHD, I am hearing impaired in one ear, I am celiac. All of these are lifetime conditions that are not going anywhere If glasses didn't exist, I would certainly be disabled. But let's be real, no one considers glasses a disability, even though glasses are just as important to a vision impaired person as a wheelchair is to a walking impaired person
    • skywhopper 11mo ago
      You clearly know nothing about how these accommodations are handled.
      • lostmsu 11mo ago
        Can you clarify? I heard about the test time thing from students. That corroborates the parent comment.
    • acedTrex 11mo ago
      > They're smart kids that see a loophole in the system. They will take advantage! This is just not an acceptable cultural viewpoint. Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged.
      • rovr138 11mo ago
        > Abusing a permissive system must be discouraged. Fine. Where are the doctors? Why is the debate on the students?
        • lostmsu 11mo ago
          Both are culpable.
          • rovr138 11mo ago
            Should we not bring up to doctors our issues or worries?
            • lostmsu 11mo ago
              This question lacks nuance. Where do you draw the line? I'd draw one at suicide thoughts that you can't stop on your own and before seriously considering using any kind of psychoactive drugs for self-medication. Anything else IMO needs about as much medical intervention as a low fever case of common cold. Oh, and once these two lines are back at comfortable distance you stop.
      • carlosjobim 11mo ago
        That's how most of the people in the world are, including the dearest friends and family. Most people's only motivation in life is to find a loophole to abuse. They will even convince themselves they are something they're not to achieve it. God have mercy on us.
      • cynicalpeace 11mo ago
        Agreed. You have to really narrow the definition of "disabled" Of course, anyone who fears falling outside the definition would fight that vehemently
  • bananalychee 11mo ago
    Even 5% would be pushing it at a university. It's easy today to get a diagnosis for something like mild ADHD whether one has it or not, and everyone is on some kind of spectrum. Legitimacy aside, classifying mild, manageable conditions as disabilities that require special accommodations and/or medication is counter-productive long-term.
    • rovr138 11mo ago
      Who are you to say what should be included or not, that something can be gauged as mild or not, and that there should be a treshold?
      • ThrowMeAway1618 11mo ago
        [flagged]
      • bananalychee 11mo ago
        I have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely, for one, so perhaps I'm more of an authority on this subject than most commenters here. I suppose it would be equally trivial to seek an ASD diagnosis, since Asperger's is now lumped in with autism and classified as a disability despite not being one.
        • ThrowMeAway1618 11mo ago
          > have firsthand experience being diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD within about half an hour of self-reporting mild symptoms with a physician remotely, And that makes you competent to determine the value of the disability claims of others and the appropriate accommodations such folks should receive? Really? Then again, you are the eminent galaxy-wide expert on such things, aren't you bananalychee. Will you honor my request to impregnate my wife and daughters so they can carry offspring that's so much more valuable than anyone else on the planet? Pretty please!
        • novemp 11mo ago
  • rovr138 11mo ago
    25% of Americans have a disability, https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/media/pdfs/disability-impacts-all-of-us-infographic.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/media/pdfs/disabil... We don't know what's the percentage broken down by age. If 38% is almost 50%, 25% is almost 38%.
    • almosthere 11mo ago
      My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
      • rovr138 11mo ago
        [flagged]
        • recursive 11mo ago
          I once lived with a guy who had a valid disabled parking placard. But he didn't like to use it because he didn't feel like he really needed it. Once the apartment manager basically begged him to use it because parking was scarce in the complex and the disabled parking was under-utilized. I don't think the dad necessarily sucks here. The dad didn't make up the system.
      • lisbbb 11mo ago
        I wouldn't hold that against him that much--the overabundance of handicapped parking spots is reason enough to game that one. It's ridiculous. My wife could have qualified for a placard because of her cancer and she was in a wheelchair for awhile, but we didn't bother getting one.
    • SilasX 11mo ago
      That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disability-status-age-group.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa... Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
  • skywhopper 11mo ago
    Most everyone has some disability or other. Just because you may work around it or not think of it that way, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • bluefirebrand 11mo ago
      My point is that a disability you can simply "work around" isn't really much of a disability, is it?
• invalidOrTaken 11mo ago
  once expertise can drive benefits, expertise becomes a target for corruption weirdly: if you want good scientists, don't listen to them!
• this_user 11mo ago
  Any system that can be gamed will be gamed.
• bvisness 11mo ago
  The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article: > In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning. So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
  • almosthere 11mo ago
    If it turns out half of all people have something, it's just normal human stuff. Today's ADHD is likely a symptom of tiktoking your brain's serotonin out or some other chemical
    • missinglugnut 11mo ago
      Nonsense. This is Stanford. The admissions process filtered for highly academically successful students and then 38% of them claimed a disability which impairs their academic performance. It's bullshit of the most obvious kind.
      • rovr138 11mo ago
        Example, do you think someone that's hard of hearing can't meet the standard for a 'highly academically successful student"? Or someone that's color blind? Or someone that's blind? Or someone in a wheelchair?
        • db48x 11mo ago
          You've missed the point. How does Stanford end up with 38% of their students claiming to have a disability while other schools only have 3%? Are the other schools illegally discrimating against these students, so that their only alternative is Stanford? Or is it possible that something anomalous is happening at Stanford?
          • 11mo ago
• swatcoder 11mo ago
  That's exactly the dilemma. Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that. Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to. But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict. Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious. Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
  • rovr138 11mo ago
    Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing. And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints. So, what do you do then? > then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled Good question. We should study this and figure what the fuck we are messing up as a society... if only we had funding and also we had someone that could act with the findings and take action. Looks like Stanford might be a good place to start. How's their funding situation?
    • lmm 11mo ago
      > And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints. > So, what do you do then? You figure out what the equivalent of Blackstone's Ratio for this kind of accommodation is, and then proceed accordingly. If we declare that it's unacceptable for even a single legitimately disabled person to miss out on accommodations, then we should the nonsense and just give accommodations to everyone, explicitly.
• zubiaur 11mo ago
  I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled. And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
• jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  The necessary doctor's note can be trivially purchased without any meaningful evidence of disability. I know a number of children of wealthy families with these notes. They don't even pretend to be disabled, possession of the note makes it beyond question. Buying an advantage for your children in this way is widespread. This article suggests that it is even more widespread than I imagined.
  • pavel_lishin 11mo ago
    So, let's say we make it more difficult to get "proof" of disability, something that requires more than just a doctor's note. Won't these rich people also be able to trivially acquire these, while people who actually need accomodations will continue to struggle because it's difficult to prove they need something?
    • jandrewrogers 11mo ago
      Yes. The amount of gaming and cheating in pursuit of school credential maxing is astonishing. It is an entire industry. Parents pay many thousands of dollars to "consultants" who help facilitate it. Anecdotally this seems like it has become standard practice among the well-off families I know with children around college age. When everyone is doing it there is a sense that you have to do it too or you'll be left behind.
• apexalpha 11mo ago
  The problem is that it is also applied to disabilities that are not objectively measurable and therefor extremely prone to abuse.