Reply to Wall Street Journal on rampant growth in percentage of college students with “disabilities”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wondered what you all make of this:  It's an old story that was on 60 minutes several years ago.  I never forgot it.  Wondering if the kid attended law school or if his mother actually did:
http://articles.courant.com/1995-08-29/news/9508290152_1_elementary-school-teacher-reading-middle-school-student[/quote]

There's an interesting sentence from the above article which is dated 1995:-

"At Yale, about 40 of the university's 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students have been identified as having learning disabilities, said Fay Hanson, director of Yale's Resource Office on Disabilities."

40/10,000 = 0.4%,  compared to the numbers of 20-25% at top universities today being quoted in the Wall St Journal article from 2018?[/quote]

Does that surprise you? In 1995, what percentage of children were identified as autistic? Dyslexic? Dysgraphic? 1995 is after I finished college, but when I was a kid, there were no autistic students in our classes. Kids who were disruptive, or even just "weird" ended up somewhere else. No idea where. Kids who couldn't read well were told they were stupid and shuttled off to the VoTech track. No college for them, if they even finished HS. You think our historical identification and treatment of people with disabilities is something we should return to?[/quote]

This is not about a disability rights movement. This is about the fact that wealthy kids get dubious diagnoses while middle and poor kids who have gotten where they are entirely on their own are shut out of admissions. Only anxious, affluent parents know their children's percentile processing speed. Middle and lower class parents are just told their child is a C student, and he doesn't get to go to Pomona.[/quote]

Wealthy kids also get held back a year, so they're old for grade, have private sports coaching so they excel in their sports, have access to all sorts of tutoring so they can more easily have better grades, get access to all sorts of enrichment. Their children can go to post graduate years. They have college coaches. The children of the wealthy are privileged.

That means that children with accommodations are gaming the system? Because wealthy children are privileged? Why aren't you complaining about wealthy children having all sorts of experiences they can draw on to write those stand-out college essays? Or access to equipment allowing them to make pretty close to professional videos to supplement their college apps? And the years of private music lessons that enables them to enclose a pretty decent music supplement to show how well rounded they are, even though they aren't majoring in music.

But let's critique accommodations, because those defective kids don't belong in the same school with your normal kid, right?[/quote]

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