Incredible: Up to Forty Percent of the Students at Supposedly-Elite Universities Claim to Be, and Are Acknowledged by the School to be, "Disabled"

As you know, people who claim to be disabled get all sorts of privileges, like taking standardized tests -- to the extent they're even required any longer -- without any time limit.

But once at college, you can also use your "disability" to take all exams untimed, too.

Also, since white people are discriminated against unconstitutionally, it is even more useful to be able to claim you're a minority too, by faking a "disability." (Or, of course, by claiming to be some type of sexual minority, like "queer," which no longer means just homosexual but can mean being an "ally" of homosexuals.)

These factors plus universities now being clownshows that eat nonsense and shit failure have resulted in Stanford, supposedly an "elite" university accepting only the highest-performing students, having a student body that is 30% "disabled," almost always with some soft mental "disability" like "nuerdivergence." Things that cannot be easily disproved, in other words.

Serek Thompson @DKThomp

This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics.

- At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled
- At Amherst: more than 30 percent
- At Stanford: nearly 40 percent

Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago."

As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability--extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc -- the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded.

America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.

Even Steve Jobs' ex-wife's vanity newsletter The Atlantic sees this as a problem.

America's colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem.

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.

Like cell phones you can look up the answers on.

The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school's low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it's taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations--often, extra time on tests--has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

"You hear 'students with disabilities' and it's not kids in wheelchairs," one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn't have tenure, told me. "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.

We can't just blame the universities.

Left-wing Congressmen are also to blame.

...

Change was slow at first, in part because Supreme Court rulings narrowed the scope of the law. Professors I spoke with told me that, even in the early 2000s, they taught only a handful of students with disabilities. Then, in 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the law's original intent. The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. It also included a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by a disability ("learning, reading, concentrating, thinking," among others) and clarified that individuals were protected under the ADA even if their impairment didn't severely restrict their daily life.

In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students' own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. "Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual's history and experience with disability and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations," AHEAD wrote.

So these dirtbag fraudsters are just self-reporting "I'm neurodivergent, I have ADHD" with no medical diagnosis at all and Congress says that we must treat this self-diagnosis as real.

Coincidentally, I just happened to watch this interesting video about people -- mostly women -- self-diagnosing themselves with a novel and quite fake new syndrome called "AuDHD," which is, supposedly, autism plus ADHD.

Autism, which involves fixating on something and focusing on it to the exclusion of all else, plus the inability to focus on something.

This woman, who I guess is a psychologist or psychiatrist, says that this fake diagnosis is gaining traction because psychiatrists just can't say "no" to patients. If some moron comes in claiming they are both hyper-focused and yet cannot focus, the psychiatrist just says "Yes."

Why are psychiatrists board certified if any asshole off the street can self-diagnose?

This woman points out that one of the women claiming to have this nonsensical diagnosis is clearly not autistic, as, for example, she admits she craves attention and validation -- something autistics usually don't care about -- and deploys strategies like "mirroring" and "love-bombing" to manipulate men into falling in love with her.

As she says: Autistics wish they could deploy the tactic of personality-mirroring to make people fall in love with them. But actual autistics cannot even understand other people's specific personalities, nevermind being able to "mirror" them, that is, act just like them so that the other person sees you as a kindred spirit.

If autistics could just "act like other people" then, get this, they would not be autistic.

But just as with the trans fad, young women are determined to diagnose themselves with some "hot" new mental illness, and just like with the trans fad, alleged medical professionals are too afraid to tell them that they're full of shit and need to grow the hell up.

So, get ready for the next Designer Mental Illness.

"AuDHD" is so hot right now, all the cool kids have it.

posted by Ace at 01:20 PM

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