The last time this came up I visited some of the subreddits for universities, most of which had threads discussing this. The discussions there shed more light o

The last time this came up I visited some of the subreddits for universities, most of which had threads discussing this. The discussions there shed more light on the motivations than some of these articles do. - At some universities, registering as having certain disabilities gives students priority access in the housing queue, so anyone who isn't registered with the disability office gets to choose after those who are. - Certain disabilities qualified people for a lottery for single dorm rooms. They have a limited number of single rooms for students with disabilities, so now that 30-40% of the student body is registering for them it's just another lottery. - Some universities allow students to record lectures only if they're registered with the disability office. If you're not, you can't record. - I remember one comment saying that people were doing it just to get newer dorms with hardwood floors, which were reserved for students with disabilities - Having certain disabilities qualified people to get out of the required meal plan. So if someone didn't want to buy a meal plan for whatever reason (including to save money) their only option was to claim certain disabilities. At other universities it was enough to claim you were following a Jain diet which objected to root vegetables and other things, which the meal plans couldn't provide for. If you don't claim a disability or Jain, you have to buy the meal plan. Adding to this: Even back when I was in college (not that long ago) it became known that registering as having ADHD qualified you for extra time on exams. A lot of parents were pushing their kids to get registered as ADHD purely for academic advantage. A few people I knew did it and were blown away at how easy it was to get a diagnosis (they just memorized the ADHD inventory questions and went to the laziest doctor they could find) and then walk that down to the disability office and suddenly they were exempt from a lot of the test taking requirements every else had. I remember someone bragging that they got to take their tests in a special location with proctors that had to be scheduled later, so they were taking every test a day or two after everyone else. They used that time to quiz all of their friends on the test content. I doubt (or hope) this level of manipulation is still common though.