38% of Stanford undergrads receive disability accommodations—but it’s become a college-wide phenomenon as Gen Z try to succeed in the current climate (which must be aiming for the Longest Title award) notes the large percentage of students that receive accommodations (such as deadline extensions) due to disabilities such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression: while 38% at Standford is the highest, multiple prestigious universities are named all with 20-40% disability rates.
Experts note that many students have medical conditions that merit accommodations, and the increase is in part linked to broader access to mental-health care and reduced stigma around seeking support. The rise has nonetheless drawn national attention, with some critics arguing that students are abusing the system to secure lighter workloads or an edge in hypercompetitive classrooms.
I think it’s tempting to think that it’s just people being lazy and looking for excuses to not work hard, and there are definitely some cases like that, but I’d think that overwhelmingly these people grapple with real issues, not in a small part caused by us having successfully managed to build a world in which being anxious and depressed seems, well, completely reasonable. Adding social media and AI anxiety into the mix then makes a nervous breakdown start to look like a perfectly normal way to spend a Wednesday.
(I do have a pet-peeve with calling these ‘disabilities’, as if people who suffer from anxiety – even chronic anxiety – somehow need similar treatment as those are blind. I understand the intention, which is something like “these people need extra flexibility”, but by labeling them the same, I feel like we’re doing them all a disservice. Anyway.)
Obviously this is a massive problem for all the people it affects, and while I get how it’s a source of headache and frustration for teachers and professors, a much bigger problem I think is that extra considerations may be given in school or university, but a lot less so at work – as the article continues:
For students, the increase in accommodations coincides with employers rethinking what actually matters in hiring. Fewer companies are prioritizing degrees, and more are evaluating on what they can do—through portfolio, projects, and real-world problem-solving. That shift could complicate the picture for students who’ve grown accustomed to extended deadlines or extra time.
[…] workplace assessments typically don’t come with accommodations—and performance is often judged on speed, accuracy, and consistency. Some Gen Zers have already faced the pink slip just months into the start of their career due to employers being unimpressed with some of their soft skills, like organization.
In other words: even as college becomes more flexible, the job market is moving in the opposite direction.
Young people are already at a massive disadvantage when trying to find jobs as entry-level positions are becoming harder and harder to find (apparently some 25% of new graduates cannot find a job!), and so the education and work are already a world apart. And this is not even the only issue of this kind that education faces: Citing ‘severe’ math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM (discussed on Hacker News):
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.
This is relevant here because:
UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents unanimously voted to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.
I can’t help but feel a parallel between the two stories: trying to make the world more equitable appears to negatively effect performance, i.e. the kind of results that our world demands. This makes intuitive sense: you can either optimize the world for performance and leave behind anyone who can’t keep up, or you can optimize the world for maximum inclusion where nobody is left behind, and live with the decreased productivity. We seem to be trying to do both at the same time.
In that vein, one way to improve the situation would be to make workplaces also more accessible, but that becomes very problematic very quickly, to a bigger degree than even diversity quotas, which is going to be extra ammunition to the political right. Our society is torn between wanting to reward performance and competition while also wanting everybody to win said competition, and the only winner of this situation is going to be populism.