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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-bend-the-rules-for-more-students-give-them-extra-help-1527154200

“At Pomona, 22% of students were considered disabled this year, up from 5% in 2014. Other elite schools have also seen a startling jump in disabilities, according to data from the federal government and from the schools. At Hampshire, Amherst and Smith colleges in Massachusetts and Yeshiva University in New York, one in five students are classified as disabled. At Oberlin College in Ohio, it is one in four. At Marlboro College in Vermont, it is one in three.”

I’m sorry, but this is disgraceful. It’s one thing if you are legally blind, but anxiety or ADHD should not be grounds for giving someone twice the time to take an exam. It’s unfair to the more humble students who are less inclined to take advantage of what should be reserved for people are are truly in-need. [/quote]

[b]The amount of ignorance in PP's comment is really what is disgraceful[/b].[/quote]

?  How so?  The rate of increase since 2014 is staggering.[/quote]

Having a disability isn't disgraceful.  Having a disability and attending college isn't disgraceful.  Having a disability, attending college, and having appropriate accommodations isn't disgraceful either.  Also, ignorant people like OP don't get to decide what is or is not a disability.

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but it's obviously gaming the system.  No possible way could there be a four-fold increase in "disabilities" in just 4 years.  I think the prof's posting above probably explains what's going on about right[/quote]

Yes there can if people with disabilities were unlikely to be labeled as such until recently.  I know plenty of people with ADHD or ASD who've graduated college without having been diagnosed.  It's incredibly common in my generation to only learn of your diagnosis after the diagnosis of your child.  I also know people who have very successful careers who were unable to complete college because of their disabilities.

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Sure.  But that's not 25% of the entire college class!  Come on.  [/quote]

In wealthier areas schools, 11-13% of the kids receive special education services.  I would guess that if a college were well known to have a superior students with disabilities office, they would receive a disproportionate percentage of applications from students with disabilities.  My DS has dyslexia and ASD and you'd better believe I pay attention to conversations about where other kids with disabilities are headed to for college even though that is years off.  Hell, I've mapped out which HSs offer Latin or ASL for the language requirement.

OP's use of scare quotes and "rampant" and PP's fixation on extended test time demonstrate an assumption that the vast majority of students with disabilities are cheaters who just want to game the system.  That is a willfully ignorant.  It's not clear at all from the numbers that there is abuse or, if there is abuse, what form it takes.  We do know is that the percentage of children being diagnosed with ASD is steadily increasing.  We know that somewhere around 15% of elementary students have some level of reading disability (but we refuse to screen for it, so it is vastly under-identified).  We know that record number of high school students are suffering from anxiety and depression.  But here you are, so concerned that there might be college students getting extra time on tests.

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I find it extremely hard to believe that a quarter of students in any give college have disabilities that *require academic accommodations.*  Just because a child has anxiety or depression does not mean that they need extra time on a test or special care. In fact, that kind of treatment can be counter-productive.  Your child with ASD and dyslexia is a different story.  Also, where do you get that 15% of kids have a reading disablity? that seems hard to believe.  [/quote]

Require academic accommodations or require accommodations?  Accommodations include accessible dorm rooms for students with physical disabilities.

Yale studies in the 90's showed about 20% of the population have dyslexia.  They tested all students in the sample population rather than testing only parent or teacher referred students.  That study also debunked the myth that boys have higher rates of dyslexia than girls; it's a result of significant selection bias.  Dyslexia is a very common non-obvious LD that schools fight tooth and nail not to identify because of the potential resource drain of providing services.  They also don't provide services to any appreciable degree.  Many parents of kids with any significant level of dyslexia spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on tutoring ... which also means that kids of families who can't afford it likely will never do well academically.  This is the reality of disability in education ... not this phantom menace of hordes of undeserving slackers gaming the system.

Here is from US News & World Report in 2011 -- http://dyslexia.yale.edu/colleges-step-up-to-meet-dyslexia-challenge/

[i]According to a 1991 study conducted at the University of California-Berkeley, this makes a difference. Dyslexic students taking a standardized reading test scored on par with their peers when granted extra time, but lagged significantly when they were not. [b]Importantly, students without the disability produced virtually the same scores regardless of whether they were given additional time.
[/b]
But getting such help can be a challenge for those who need it. Each year the College Board administers the SAT to more than 2 million individuals. According to Steven Pereira, the College Board’s executive director of services for students with disabilities, about 32,000 members of the class of 2010 took the test with accommodations.

Pereira says that about 85 percent of all students annually who request assists receive them if they can document their disabilities. However, Shaywitz points out that since dyslexics alone are about 20 percent of the population, the fact that so few students are accommodated suggests there are flaws in how they are handled.[/i]

There is a strong belief among some that many kids diagnosed with ADHD also have mild dyslexia since the two have some sort of correlation.

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I seriously doubt that 15% of kids are getting into top colleges with previously undiagnosed dyslexia that requires academic accomodations.  Come on. [/quote]

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