14 ms·

Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is releva

by shetaye 10mo ago

Regarding Stanford specifically, I did not see the number broken down by academic or residential disability (in the underlying Atlantic article). This is relevant, because > Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals. buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection. I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each). edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.

lostmsu 10mo ago
I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago
  I suppose stanford does optimize for cheating, but this still seems excessive
  - josefritzishere 10mo ago
    I use the word "cheating" like I use the word "hacking." The connotation can be either good or bad or contextually. You are defeating a system. The intent of the cheater/hacker is where we get into moral judgements. (This is a great sub-thread.)
  - RachelF 10mo ago
    Sadly, society also optimizes for cheating. Meritocracy is a myth. In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.
    - trollbridge 10mo ago
      Or Stanford is influential enough that it creates the future new world, which now will have far more cheating.
    - only-one1701 10mo ago
      This is what it comes down to
  - nextos 10mo ago
    I reviewed incoming applications during one Oxbridge academic application cycle. I raised some serious concerns, nobody listened, and therefore I refuse to take part on that any longer. Basically, lots of students are pretending to be disabled to enhance their chances with applications that are not particularly outstanding, taking spots from truly disabled students. All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system. I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks. Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
    - ahtihn 10mo ago
      > Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact. I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.
      - nextos 10mo ago
        That was my point, it is not a disability from an education POV, or at least I would not consider it as such without an independent audit.
    - reliabilityguy 10mo ago
      > The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not: 1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations 2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties 3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
- margalabargala 10mo ago
  The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did. There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them. If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 10mo ago
    In the culture I grew up in, this was considered cheating.
    - delichon 10mo ago
      A culture that honored truth telling and integrity. Was that long ago or far away?
      - shermantanktop 10mo ago
        "culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them." Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
        IAmBroom 10mo ago
        I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home). So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
- bee_rider 10mo ago
  In the context of academics I’d call it manipulating, exploiting or scamming the housing system, rather than cheating. Just because academic cheating is the center-of-gravity for this type of conversation, and, IMO, a much much bigger deal. If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
  - only-one1701 10mo ago
    This whole comment thread has been a crazy way to find out the ways people justify immoral behavior to themselves.
    - femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
      This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.
      - only-one1701 10mo ago
        So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.
        afavour 10mo ago
        That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society. (when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- seizethecheese 10mo ago
  I suppose so, but nonetheless it still likely harms the rest of the students who are honest by raising the price of housing for all students.
  - echelon 10mo ago
    The diploma or credentials should be marked with the conditions of admission. That would prevent abuse from those who don't or shouldn't qualify for special admission conditions.
    - crooked-v 10mo ago
      ...and punish those who genuinely develop or suffer from some new condition after admittal.
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      And make real disabled people unemployable.
- aaronbwebber 10mo ago
  It means that the action we should take in response to this article is "building more dorms with singles" rather than "we need to rethink the way that we are making accommodations for disabilities in educational contexts". That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
  - IgorPartola 10mo ago
    I worked in residential life while in college and can tell you that placing freshmen in singles is a horrible idea. It leads to isolation and lets mental health issues fester. Some need it but you do not want to place anyone who doesn’t into a room alone especially in their first year.
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      Lol, what an uniquely USA point of view.
    - tomrod 10mo ago
      Meh. I think you're overstating it. To meet your anecdata, I had both the first college year, and single > double by a large margin.
      - Onawa 10mo ago
        It depends on the person. I lived alone in my last year of undergrad and it sent me into a deep depression. I figured out that living alone was too much isolation for me and moved back in with a roommate. That helped to pull me out of my depression and be able to finish my degree.
        duskdozer 10mo ago
        I don't think people advocating for more single rooms would say that no multi-occupancy rooms should exist for people who do want them.
      - 10mo ago
- outside2344 10mo ago
  I mean, they watch our president, who got a JET for god knows what, and after seeing that, why shouldn't they grab for the bag?
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Cheating to get limited housing benefits starves those limited resources from truly disabled students who actually need them. Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
outside2344 10mo ago
Just training for working at McKinsey after graduation
- Invictus0 10mo ago
  Navigating Bureaucracy 101
  - TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    Given the current pace of changes and levels of uncertainty about the labor market 5-10 years from now, this may actually be the most useful skill-set the university is teaching students today.
    - Invictus0 10mo ago
      Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
op00to 10mo ago
I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.
- rurban 10mo ago
  Add it to their LinkedIn and final evaluation and the problem solves itself
lumost 10mo ago
They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage. It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.
- notrealyme123 10mo ago
  Wow that's interesting! Could you share your sources?
  - only-one1701 10mo ago
    I’m not sure what you mean by “interesting”, can you please explain, ideally by citing a few reputable dictionaries?
    - bad_haircut72 10mo ago
      I dont know why you're getting downvoted, I see this all the time and its infuriating. Its a deflection tactic to burn peoples time.
      - only-one1701 10mo ago
        I think you answered your own question as to why this is getting downvoted lol
        bad_haircut72 10mo ago
        The person I replied to was clearly using sarcasm
  - mikkupikku 10mo ago
    Source for amphetamines being a performance enhancing drug? Try some lol. Really, they're habit forming and destructive so don't take them, but the reason they're so popular is they really do kick you up.
newsclues 10mo ago
Follow the incentives
Aurornis 10mo ago
The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsFCUJZQ0G9lMNnLXcGfnS-w&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do. Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too. If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note. The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
- jaredklewis 10mo ago
  Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards? I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.
godelski 10mo ago
Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things. The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias... I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions. [rant] Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about. [/rant] So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you? [0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis. [1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased [2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM) [3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8 https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8 [4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say? [5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.
jareds 10mo ago
I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.
- dathinab 10mo ago
  What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is: - why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single) - I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single. through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
rayiner 10mo ago
Seems like evidence of profound moral decline that students would do that.
- lurking_swe 10mo ago
  not even moral decline! I’d personally feel like a fraud every day if I “made it“ by using 5 different _unnecessary_ accommodations. Where is the satisfaction in that? I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters. People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.
honkostani 10mo ago
[dead]
jimbokun 10mo ago
Still shitty privileged behavior, and any doctor providing a diagnosis just to get a kid a better dorm room, should immediately have his or her license revoked.
- jareds 10mo ago
  I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
  - jimbokun 10mo ago
    Yes, my comment doesn't apply to you. Sorry if I implied that it did.
onetimeusename 10mo ago
It would be interesting to test that maybe by looking at the disability rate before and after the honor code was changed recently. If there was an increase in disabilities, it might be because other cheating options on exams were limited. For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.
andrewrn 10mo ago
Did anyone else actually enjoy dorm life? I was a freshman some years ago, so maybe it’s generational, but it was a very fond time. I guess it’s probably high variance. My roomate was a great dude. I can easily see how it could go the other way.
- lurking_swe 10mo ago
  i remember being woken up at 3am by him vomiting in the middle of the room. In the morning he used my swiffer to clean up his vomit. I told him to keep the swiffer . On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.
  - andrewrn 10mo ago
    Yeah fair fair. It's high variance. My roommate once had a bunch of his highschool friends over for a weekend and one of them sleep-peed onto my roommate's stack of books.
- JCharante 10mo ago
  I had a bad roommate who when I asked the people in the house to turn the music down he would tell them to turn it up, and he constantly had annoying guests in our tiny room. Fuck Patrick you know who you are..
esascammer 10mo ago
It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.
- p-e-w 10mo ago
  This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.
  - smegma2 10mo ago
    Yes, but people who lie are also at fault
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      Hate the game (the system and the people who set it up and are maintaining it), not the player.
cyanydeez 10mo ago
Is this better or worse than nepo babies, white privilege or other normal social status benefits for college?
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  Being born to rich white people doesn't provide positive reinforcement for sleazy behavior at an age where people are likely to take the lesson seriously. So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;
  - cyanydeez 10mo ago
    Were full atm. Please stand inline behind the ICE bootlickers
raincom 10mo ago
30% of passengers ask for wheelchairs on long distance flights from India. That's how the system gets abused for priority boarding.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
DuperPower 10mo ago
this is very educational, on how being a victim an a psychopath helps you in life:)
marsupial 10mo ago
"buries the lede" oh how I hate this phrase
- VerifiedReports 10mo ago
  It's used inaccurately in OP's comment, too, because housing isn't mentioned in the article at all. So it's not "buried."
gxs 10mo ago
Uh it leaves out one of the more important things that you also get more time for exams
duskdozer 10mo ago
It really seems strange to me that single rooms haven't become the norm, especially in light of how many people clearly prefer them. It's one thing to share a kitchen or bathroom in an apartment, but after college, how many people ever share bedrooms with anyone except a partner?
- Thorrez 10mo ago
  More single young adults 18-29 live with a roommate than alone. Of course people clearly prefer living alone. But it's more expensive. Housing is already expensive, so something that makes it even more expensive is possibly not the best idea. >In 1990 7.4% of single young adults were living with a roommate, increasing to 8.1% in 2000. From 2010 through 2022 the share was stable, reaching 8.7% in 2022. >From 1990 through 2016 the share of single young adults living alone remained relatively stable, ranging from 6.0% to 6.8%. However, the share increased to 8.2% in 2022. Although I think this does include current students. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP-24-16.html https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP...
  - duskdozer 10mo ago
    >with a roommate But in the same bedroom? Because outside the context of a college dorm, I don't think I've really come across "roommate" as referring to sharing a bedroom, and sharing a 2BR apartment is a significantly different situation.
tgma 10mo ago
Funny that it keeps getting rediscovered that the statement from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs includes two variables: needs and ability both can and will be reward-hacked.
VerifiedReports 10mo ago
It doesn't bury the lede; housing isn't mentioned at all, anywhere in the article. Your additional insights are interesting and believable, however.

by shetaye 10mo ago

lostmsu 10mo ago

I suppose cheating to get housing benefits is less of a dumpster fuck vs cheating to get ahead of other people in education.

MangoToupe 10mo ago
I suppose stanford does optimize for cheating, but this still seems excessive
- josefritzishere 10mo ago
  I use the word "cheating" like I use the word "hacking." The connotation can be either good or bad or contextually. You are defeating a system. The intent of the cheater/hacker is where we get into moral judgements. (This is a great sub-thread.)
- RachelF 10mo ago
  Sadly, society also optimizes for cheating. Meritocracy is a myth. In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.
  - trollbridge 10mo ago
    Or Stanford is influential enough that it creates the future new world, which now will have far more cheating.
  - only-one1701 10mo ago
    This is what it comes down to
- nextos 10mo ago
  I reviewed incoming applications during one Oxbridge academic application cycle. I raised some serious concerns, nobody listened, and therefore I refuse to take part on that any longer. Basically, lots of students are pretending to be disabled to enhance their chances with applications that are not particularly outstanding, taking spots from truly disabled students. All it takes is a lack of principles, exaggerating a bit, and getting a letter from a doctor. Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability. Now, if you create a compelling story inflating how this had an adverse impact on your education and get support letters, you might successfully cheat the system. I have seen several such cases. The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. In my opinion, a more serious audit-based system is necessary. Applicants that claim to be disabled but that are not recognized as such by the Government should go through some extra checks. Otherwise, we end up in the current situation where truly disabled students are extremely rare, but we have a large corpus of unscrupulous little Machiavelli, which is also worrying on its own sake.
  - ahtihn 10mo ago
    > Imagine you have poor eyesight requiring a substantial correction, but you can still drive. That's not a disability It absolutely is a disability! The fact that it's easy to deal with it doesn't change that fact. I would not find it credible that it has a real impact on education though.
    - nextos 10mo ago
      That was my point, it is not a disability from an education POV, or at least I would not consider it as such without an independent audit.
  - reliabilityguy 10mo ago
    > The admissions system is not effectively dealing with this type of fraud. If I was the university I would prefer these types of disabled students. Why not: 1. They are not really disabled, so I do not have to spend a lot of many for real accommodations 2. No need to deal with a higher chance (I’m guessing here) of academic difficulties 3. Basically, I hit disability metric without paying any cost!
margalabargala 10mo ago
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did. There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them. If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- ahmeneeroe-v2 10mo ago
  In the culture I grew up in, this was considered cheating.
  - delichon 10mo ago
    A culture that honored truth telling and integrity. Was that long ago or far away?
    - shermantanktop 10mo ago
      "culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them." Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
      - IAmBroom 10mo ago
        I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home). So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
bee_rider 10mo ago
In the context of academics I’d call it manipulating, exploiting or scamming the housing system, rather than cheating. Just because academic cheating is the center-of-gravity for this type of conversation, and, IMO, a much much bigger deal. If someone says they cheated in school, the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t that they might have gotten a single dorm room, right?
- only-one1701 10mo ago
  This whole comment thread has been a crazy way to find out the ways people justify immoral behavior to themselves.
  - femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
    This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.
    - only-one1701 10mo ago
      So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.
      - afavour 10mo ago
        That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society. (when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)
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seizethecheese 10mo ago
I suppose so, but nonetheless it still likely harms the rest of the students who are honest by raising the price of housing for all students.
- echelon 10mo ago
  The diploma or credentials should be marked with the conditions of admission. That would prevent abuse from those who don't or shouldn't qualify for special admission conditions.
  - crooked-v 10mo ago
    ...and punish those who genuinely develop or suffer from some new condition after admittal.
  - LtWorf 10mo ago
    And make real disabled people unemployable.
aaronbwebber 10mo ago
It means that the action we should take in response to this article is "building more dorms with singles" rather than "we need to rethink the way that we are making accommodations for disabilities in educational contexts". That seems like an important distinction, and makes the rest of the article (which focuses on educational accommodations) look mistaken.
- IgorPartola 10mo ago
  I worked in residential life while in college and can tell you that placing freshmen in singles is a horrible idea. It leads to isolation and lets mental health issues fester. Some need it but you do not want to place anyone who doesn’t into a room alone especially in their first year.
  - LtWorf 10mo ago
    Lol, what an uniquely USA point of view.
  - tomrod 10mo ago
    Meh. I think you're overstating it. To meet your anecdata, I had both the first college year, and single > double by a large margin.
    - Onawa 10mo ago
      It depends on the person. I lived alone in my last year of undergrad and it sent me into a deep depression. I figured out that living alone was too much isolation for me and moved back in with a roommate. That helped to pull me out of my depression and be able to finish my degree.
      - duskdozer 10mo ago
        I don't think people advocating for more single rooms would say that no multi-occupancy rooms should exist for people who do want them.
    - 10mo ago
outside2344 10mo ago
I mean, they watch our president, who got a JET for god knows what, and after seeing that, why shouldn't they grab for the bag?
Aurornis 10mo ago
Cheating to get limited housing benefits starves those limited resources from truly disabled students who actually need them. Also, there are academic components to disability cheating. As the article notes, registering for a disability at some of these universities grants you additional time to take tests.

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outside2344 10mo ago

Just training for working at McKinsey after graduation

Invictus0 10mo ago
Navigating Bureaucracy 101
- TeMPOraL 10mo ago
  Given the current pace of changes and levels of uncertainty about the labor market 5-10 years from now, this may actually be the most useful skill-set the university is teaching students today.
  - Invictus0 10mo ago
    Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

op00to 10mo ago

I’ve lived with enough nightmare roommates in my college experience to know many people probably have some sort of disability that precludes them from having a roommate.

rurban 10mo ago
Add it to their LinkedIn and final evaluation and the problem solves itself

lumost 10mo ago

They lead with the headline that most of these students have a mental health disability - particularly ADHD. Is it surprising that legalized Amphetamines drive teenagers to higher performance for a short period in their lives? Adderall and other amphetamines only have problems with long term usage. It should be expected that some portion of the teenage population sees a net-benefit from Amphetamines for the duration of late high school/college. It's unlikely that that net-benefit holds for the rest of their lives.

notrealyme123 10mo ago
Wow that's interesting! Could you share your sources?
- only-one1701 10mo ago
  I’m not sure what you mean by “interesting”, can you please explain, ideally by citing a few reputable dictionaries?
  - bad_haircut72 10mo ago
    I dont know why you're getting downvoted, I see this all the time and its infuriating. Its a deflection tactic to burn peoples time.
    - only-one1701 10mo ago
      I think you answered your own question as to why this is getting downvoted lol
      - bad_haircut72 10mo ago
        The person I replied to was clearly using sarcasm
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
  Source for amphetamines being a performance enhancing drug? Try some lol. Really, they're habit forming and destructive so don't take them, but the reason they're so popular is they really do kick you up.

newsclues 10mo ago

Follow the incentives

Aurornis 10mo ago

The original article which is linked in this post goes into much better detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsFCUJZQ0G9lMNnLXcGfnS-w&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit... Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do. Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too. If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note. The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.

jaredklewis 10mo ago
Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place? Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good? Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards? I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.

godelski 10mo ago

Not at Stanford, but recent (PhD) graduate and I think you're pretty spot on, but also missing some things. The definition of disability is pretty wide. I have an emotional support animal but if it wasn't for the housing requirement I probably wouldn't have declared anything. I do have diagnosed depression[0] and ADHD. I tend to not be open about these unless it is relevant to the conversation and I don't really put it down in job applications or other questionnaires. But being more socially acceptable I also believe more people are getting diagnosed AND more people are putting an accurate mark on those questionnaires. I can absolutely tell you many people lie on these and I'd bet there are *far* more false negatives than false positives. Social stigma should suggest that direction of bias... I say this because I really dislike Reason[1]. There's an element of truth in there, but they are also biased and using that truth to paint an inaccurate narrative. Reason says I've made this part of my identity, but that couldn't be further from the truth. What they're aware of and using to pervert the narrative is that our measurements have changed. That's a whole other conversation than what they said and they get to sidestep several more important questions. [rant] Also, people are getting diagnosed more! I can't tell you why everyone has a diagnosis these days, but I can say why I got my ADHD diagnosis at the age of 30 (depression was made pretty young). For one, social stigma has changed. I used to completely hide my depression and ADHD. Now that it is more acceptable I will openly discuss it when the time is right, but it's not like I'm proud of my depression or ADHD. But there is also the fact that the world has changed and what used to be more manageable became not. Getting treated changed my life for the better, but the modern world and how things are going have changed things for the worse. Doing a PhD is no joke[2], doing it in a pandemic is crazy, doing it in a ML boom (and researching ML) is harder, and doing it with an adversarial advisor is even worse. On top of that the world is just getting more difficult to navigate for me. Everything is trying to grab my attention and I have to be far more defensive about it. Instead of being in an office where I can signal "work mode" and "open to talk mode" with a door I get pings on slack by people who want to be synchronous with an asynchronous communication platform, messaging "hey"[3] and nothing else. A major issue with ADHD is triage, because everything seems like an emergency. If you're constantly pinging me and I can't signal that I need to be left alone, then that just drives the anxiety up. This is only worsened by the fact that Slack's notification system is, at best, insufferable[4]. So I don't know about everyone else, but I'm absolutely not surprised that other peoples' anxiety is shooting through the roof. We haven't even mentioned politics, economics, or many other things I know you're all thinking about. [/rant] So yeah, there's the housing issue and I do think that's worth talking about (it's true for an apartment too[5]). I'd gladly pay the pet deposit and extra money per month for a pet. It is never an option, so people go "nuclear". BUT ALSO I think we should have a different conversation about the world we're actually creating and how it is just making things difficult. The world is complicated, no surprise, but our efforts to oversimplify things are just making it more complicated. I really just wish we'd all get some room to breathe and rethink some things. I really wish we could just talk like normal human beings and stop fighting, blaming, and pointing fingers as if there's some easy to dismiss clear bad guy. There's plenty of times where there is, but more often there is no smoking gun. I know what an anxiety feedback loop looks like and I really don't know why we want the whole world to do this. They fucking suck! I don't want to be in one! Do you? [0] My mom passed away when I was a pre-teen. I think no one is surprised nor doubts this diagnosis. [1] I'm also not a big fan of The Atlantic. Both are highly biased [2] I actually think a PhD should be a great place for ADHD people. Or research in general. Many of us get sucked down rabbit holes and see things from a different point of view. These can be major advantages in research and science. But these are major hurdles when the academic framework is to publish or perish. There's no ability to get depth or chase rabbit holes. I was always compared to peers who published 50 papers in a year as if that is a good thing. (Yeah, the dude did a lot of work and he should be proud, but those papers are obviously shallow. He should be proud, but we also need nuance in how we evaluate. https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM https://youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM) [3] https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8 https://youtu.be/OF_5EKNX0Eg?t=8 [4] Thanks, I really needed that phone notification to a message I responded to an hour ago. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a muted channel. Thanks, I really needed that notification to a random thread I wasn't mentioned in and have never sent a single message in. Thanks, I'm glad I didn't get a notification to that @godelski in #general or #that-channel-I-admin. Does slack even care about what my settings say? [5] My hypothesis is that the no pet clauses are put in because people use templates. And justified because one bad experience gets shared and sits in peoples heads stronger than the extra money in their pockets.

jareds 10mo ago

I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.

dathinab 10mo ago
What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is: - why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single) - I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single. through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)

rayiner 10mo ago

Seems like evidence of profound moral decline that students would do that.

lurking_swe 10mo ago
not even moral decline! I’d personally feel like a fraud every day if I “made it“ by using 5 different _unnecessary_ accommodations. Where is the satisfaction in that? I’m a slow reader. Do i have a disability? Who cares - i can still read well and did OK at school, that’s all that matters. People that game the system in this way are basically frauds. They take resources that are intended to benefit people that ARE struggling with basic life skills in some way.

honkostani 10mo ago

[dead]

jimbokun 10mo ago

Still shitty privileged behavior, and any doctor providing a diagnosis just to get a kid a better dorm room, should immediately have his or her license revoked.

jareds 10mo ago
I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
- jimbokun 10mo ago
  Yes, my comment doesn't apply to you. Sorry if I implied that it did.

onetimeusename 10mo ago

It would be interesting to test that maybe by looking at the disability rate before and after the honor code was changed recently. If there was an increase in disabilities, it might be because other cheating options on exams were limited. For those wondering, the honor code was changed to make all exams proctored because of a number of academic dishonesty issues that happened allegedly.

andrewrn 10mo ago

Did anyone else actually enjoy dorm life? I was a freshman some years ago, so maybe it’s generational, but it was a very fond time. I guess it’s probably high variance. My roomate was a great dude. I can easily see how it could go the other way.

lurking_swe 10mo ago
i remember being woken up at 3am by him vomiting in the middle of the room. In the morning he used my swiffer to clean up his vomit. I told him to keep the swiffer . On the bright side, i met my spouse and we’ve been together for 10+ years so not all bad lol.
- andrewrn 10mo ago
  Yeah fair fair. It's high variance. My roommate once had a bunch of his highschool friends over for a weekend and one of them sleep-peed onto my roommate's stack of books.
JCharante 10mo ago
I had a bad roommate who when I asked the people in the house to turn the music down he would tell them to turn it up, and he constantly had annoying guests in our tiny room. Fuck Patrick you know who you are..

esascammer 10mo ago

It is beyond frustrating that people - in general - abuse accommodations for those with legitimate disabilities in order to bring their pets into places they don’t belong.

p-e-w 10mo ago
This is 100% the fault of a society that has continuously pushed to expand the meaning of “disability” (and many other words) until it no longer resembles anything that a reasonable person would associate with the term, while aggressively silencing anyone who dared to speak out against that concept creep.
- smegma2 10mo ago
  Yes, but people who lie are also at fault
  - machomaster 10mo ago
    Hate the game (the system and the people who set it up and are maintaining it), not the player.

cyanydeez 10mo ago

Is this better or worse than nepo babies, white privilege or other normal social status benefits for college?

potato3732842 10mo ago
Being born to rich white people doesn't provide positive reinforcement for sleazy behavior at an age where people are likely to take the lesson seriously. So yeah, I'll take nepo babies and racism over this any day;
- cyanydeez 10mo ago
  Were full atm. Please stand inline behind the ICE bootlickers

raincom 10mo ago

30% of passengers ask for wheelchairs on long distance flights from India. That's how the system gets abused for priority boarding.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

DuperPower 10mo ago

this is very educational, on how being a victim an a psychopath helps you in life:)

marsupial 10mo ago

"buries the lede" oh how I hate this phrase

VerifiedReports 10mo ago
It's used inaccurately in OP's comment, too, because housing isn't mentioned in the article at all. So it's not "buried."

gxs 10mo ago

Uh it leaves out one of the more important things that you also get more time for exams

duskdozer 10mo ago

It really seems strange to me that single rooms haven't become the norm, especially in light of how many people clearly prefer them. It's one thing to share a kitchen or bathroom in an apartment, but after college, how many people ever share bedrooms with anyone except a partner?

Thorrez 10mo ago
More single young adults 18-29 live with a roommate than alone. Of course people clearly prefer living alone. But it's more expensive. Housing is already expensive, so something that makes it even more expensive is possibly not the best idea. >In 1990 7.4% of single young adults were living with a roommate, increasing to 8.1% in 2000. From 2010 through 2022 the share was stable, reaching 8.7% in 2022. >From 1990 through 2016 the share of single young adults living alone remained relatively stable, ranging from 6.0% to 6.8%. However, the share increased to 8.2% in 2022. Although I think this does include current students. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP-24-16.html https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP...
- duskdozer 10mo ago
  >with a roommate But in the same bedroom? Because outside the context of a college dorm, I don't think I've really come across "roommate" as referring to sharing a bedroom, and sharing a 2BR apartment is a significantly different situation.

tgma 10mo ago

Funny that it keeps getting rediscovered that the statement from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs includes two variables: needs and ability both can and will be reward-hacked.

VerifiedReports 10mo ago

It doesn't bury the lede; housing isn't mentioned at all, anywhere in the article. Your additional insights are interesting and believable, however.