Why Are So Many College Students Claiming Disability?
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In Discourse, Colleen Eren writes about the surprising rise in the number of college students claiming disability, which requires schools to offer “accommodations”:
My part-time job of notetaker for a student with cerebral palsy was humbling. For two years in the early 2000s, I accompanied Jason (name changed), a fellow undergraduate, to his classes on Chaucer, communications and political science, taking detailed notes as he answered the professors’ questions and participated in class. During exams, he would dictate answers while we sat in the Office of Student Access Services. His work paid off and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Without a notetaker, as without a wheelchair, Jason would have been physically unable to access the class as well as its material, and to demonstrate his knowledge and aptitude.
The accommodations offered to Jason were a rarity when I was a student and even when I was beginning my college teaching career, in 2009. As a new professor, I would receive on occasion, and certainly not every semester, letters from accessibility offices alerting me to a student’s disability-related needs. These letters almost always detailed physical limitations that prevented students from managing the classwork, such as needing a notetaker or providing closed-captioning on videos. These accommodations—“the modification of policies, practices, and procedures; the provision of auxiliary aids and services; academic adjustments and modifications to the environment intended to remove barriers to equivalent access”—are mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Amendments Act, specifically Section 504, which was intended to give equal access to educational opportunities and to prevent against discriminatory practices against people with disabilities.
Over the past five years, however, my academic colleagues and I anecdotally noticed a significant increase in the frequency and type of accommodations being requested by accessibility offices. Unlike Jason’s need for a notetaker due to the physical limitations from cerebral palsy, the majority of these recent requests are almost exclusively for a burgeoning number of college students classified as having mental health issues (particularly anxiety or depression) and learning disorders or attention-deficit disorders, even when those conditions do not significantly impact a student’s life activities.
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