There was a time when the word disabled meant something specific. Something you could point to: a wheelchair, a cane, a pair of crutches leaning in the corner. Today, on elite campuses, the term has been stretched so far out of shape it resembles a piece of academic taffy—sweet, sticky, and everywhere.
A recent piece in The Atlantic documents that stretch with the tone of someone quietly realizing the world has gone mad. What began as a moral obligation—don’t lock people out of buildings, don’t deny them basic access—has become an arms race of diagnoses so broad that “major life activities” now include thinking, concentrating, and presumably anything more taxing than ordering iced coffee.
The numbers read like satire. At Brown and Harvard, more than one in five students is officially “disabled.” Amherst has hit 34 percent. At some law schools, 45 percent of students receive accommodations. Nearly half the future lawyers of America apparently need special handling, extra time, or a quiet room just to do what they chose to study.
The absurdity becomes even clearer when you track where these “disabilities” appear. Community colleges—where students juggle real adversity: work shifts, poverty, chaotic households, chronic illness—barely show any change. Meanwhile, Ivy-adjacent campuses look like wellness retreats for the spiritually fragile. Either rich kids are mysteriously plagued with hidden impairments, or the wealthiest slice of the American student population has discovered that a diagnosis is simply another form of academic currency. A letter from the right clinician is almost as valuable as legacy status—it buys time, space, and a smoother path through the world’s most forgiving institutions.
And the incentives in the system make this almost inevitable. Universities want to avoid lawsuits. Students want higher grades. Parents want an edge. Doctors want to avoid upsetting wealthy families. Put all four together, and you get an accommodations industry operating like a boutique legal practice.
One professor notes, with admirable restraint, that exams are supposed to test capability under pressure. But that sort of thinking belongs to an earlier era, when struggle was considered part of education, not evidence of a disorder. Now, the moment a student feels overwhelmed by a demanding class, the system offers a button labeled diagnosis. And the culture surrounding these students—steeped in therapy language, influencer psychology, and endless introspection—has convinced many that hardship isn’t something you overcome, but something you medicalize.
That’s why “extra time” has become the new campus status symbol. Not because half the student body is secretly wrestling with cognitive breakdowns, but because the definition of impairment has softened into something that covers the slightest discomfort. What once required evidence now requires little more than a feeling, an evaluative nod, and the knowledge that everyone else is doing it too.
Disability advocates argue that fraud is rare, but the data makes that hard to believe. In the broader country, about 42.5 million Americans qualify as disabled. That’s roughly 13 percent of the civilian population. Yet somehow, at elite universities, the percentage balloons to levels that make the national figures look modest. When the most privileged students in America become, on paper, the most “disabled,” something has gone wrong.
Meanwhile, the genuinely disabled students, the ones for whom the entire apparatus exists, find themselves forced to compete with a bureaucracy overloaded by healthy peers armed with documentation and a well-crafted story. And it’s naïve to imagine this kind of chicanery stops at the campus gates. Habits formed in elite universities don’t suddenly vanish. Graduates carry the same playbook into the workplace—knowing exactly which diagnosis opens which door, which label grants which protection, and how to turn discomfort into an HR-recognized condition. Over time, the pattern metastasizes. Employers inherit the same inflation, productivity suffers, and society pays for a system that rewards dishonesty.
In trying to help everyone, universities have created a system that works best for the people who need it least. The term “disabled,” once precise and protective, has been inflated to cover half the campus. And if elite colleges continue redefining “disabled” to include anyone mildly stressed, distracted, or inconvenienced by difficult work, the next absurd milestone isn’t hard to predict: campuses where disability surpasses ability—at least on paper.