If you’re a student at the University of Michigan and you suffer from a disability, the school has two centers where you can take a test that accommodates your needs. There’s a problem, though. Lately, the centers have been flooded by qualified students and other venues have had to be found.
That’s just one example of a trend in higher education that was reported a few months ago and picked up by outlets everywhere (see, for example, here and here). More and more kids at elite institutions have been popping up on disability rolls. A story in The Atlanticfrom December calls the growth “breathtaking” At the University of Chicago, it says, the number has tripled in eight years; at UC-Berkeley it has quadrupled in fifteen years, mostly from diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Now, at Amherst College, fully one-third of the undergrads are marked as disabled.
A few years ago, a friend who runs field trips for students at a tier one institution told me that the number of attendees on meds these days is shocking (chaperones are always told of existing prescriptions in case of an emergency). When I visited an elite campus in 2024, my host mentioned that in one small class he was prohibited from making too-direct eye contact with one enrollee because of the student’s social anxiety disorder.
My first experience happened around 2014 when, as more and more undergraduates at Emory University carried laptops to class and flipped them open as soon as they sat down, I started banning them entirely, telling them on day one that the class would be book, paper, and pencil, nothing else. I had to do so, having written a book warning of the danger of screens in the hands of adolescents. Besides, these were English classes, and I’d been trained in close reading exercises whereby a poem on the page draws meticulous attention. We would spend the hour on details of prosody, metaphor, structure, alliteration, irony, and any other micro-element they might notice. Screens were an anathema. They sped up these young minds too much for them to grasp the layers of meaning and niceties of style in lines such as