Analysis: The Atlantic’s ‘Accommodation Nation’ is an Ableist Abomination

On Dec. 2, The Atlantic published a piece titled “Accommodation Nation” that calls into question the validity of some college students’ accommodations. It argues, like so many articles before it—including one last year from the Chronicle of Higher Education—that there is a suspicious influx of people receiving disability-specific accommodations, that rich kids are gaming the system, and that disabled students are losing out. 

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” the piece quotes one anonymous professor saying, “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.’” The article goes on to say, “Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.”

The piece then goes on to compare disability accommodation procedures with the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal, where at least one parent used the disability-support system to fraudulently get their child into an elite university. But is that the reality or a fair comparison?

Let’s look at data first. The article says that at Brown and Harvard—both Ivy League institutions—the rate of Disabled undergraduates is around 20% and that Amherst and Stanford have rates in the 30s. That sounds high, and like an elitist problem, until you dig a little bit deeper to realize those rates are in line with national averages, according to the most recent available data. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 21% of undergraduates nationwide identified with disability between 2019 and 2020. This data, presumably, does not include a large swath of people who realized they had a disability—or have gained one—during the first phase  of the pandemic . 

When does talk to researchers for the story,  they tend to rely on a few one-off studies or, the scourge of disability reporting, the parent-turned-special-education advocate.

“A parent in Scarsdale, New York, who works in special education told me that it’s become common for parents of honors students to get their kids evaluated so they can have extra time on tests.” The story opines, “The process usually starts when kids see that their peers have accommodations — or when they bring home their first B. “It feels in some ways like a badge of honor,” she said. “People are all talking about getting their children evaluated now.”

Seemingly flying in the face of the article’s thesis is the fact that accommodations are proven to work, which the article acknowledges. What is true is that disabled university degree attainment is still woefully low. According to 2023 data from the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, 21.2% of Disabled Americans obtain at least a bachelor’s degree. The graduation rate for Disabled Americans within eight years of enrolling in a four-year degree program, according to a different 2025 study published by the Public Library of Science, is just above 34%. This means that disabled students are numerous in American universities yet struggle to graduate, regardless of the perceived validity of their accommodations in the eyes of critics.

At one point the article tries to connect so-called controversial and uncontroversial accommodations, highlighting the use of a wheelchair as an uncontroversial accommodation, and sets up a familiar tension when it comes to post secondary education coverage: student versus professor. This comes despite a 2022 study that found that 60% of the top National Institutes of Health-funded universities that year received a failing grade on accessibility. One of the lowest grades? How well universities communicated faculty and instructor roles and responsibilities when it came to accessibility. Still, The Atlantic piece opens by focusing on the besieged professor who must provide accommodations. 

“Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.”

Two problems here: a) students rarely get proper support and b) the old approach was—by and large—to ignore the needs of disabled students. This fact is even highlighted in the story, with one source saying he used to haul himself up stairs to get into the classroom during the 1980s.

The piece does include the voices of disabled advocates, but spends an inordinate amount of time playing doctor and throwing stones at the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Trump Administration has already decimated disability supports—obliterating the staff dedicated to  enforcing disability education initiatives related to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act IDEA—and it’s hard not to see this piece reinforcing rhetoric that argues a few undeserving beneficiaries means we should tear the system down to the studs.

Annoyingly, the article also falls into another trope in disability-related stories, discrediting diagnoses like ADHD or general mental-health conditions. These types of pieces tend to do this by pointing to an over- or self-diagnosis problem. While the author of The Atlantic piece does lean on a researcher in this section of the piece, the tone is dismissive. 

“Lindstrom [the researcher] worries that the system encourages students to see themselves as less capable than they actually are. By attributing all of their difficulties to a disability, they are pathologizing normal challenges. ‘When it comes to a disorder like ADHD, we all have those symptoms sometimes,’ Lindstrom told me. ‘But most of us aren’t impaired by them.”

Every ten years or so, there is a new public enemy number one when it comes to claims of over diagnosis. For ADHD and autism, that’s been at least the last 25 years. Yes, the rates of self diagnosis are a matter of growing concern in the mental-health field—and, by extension, higher education—but the article calls a surge in diagnosis something we would have understood as “absurd” just a few years ago. 

One thing most can probably agree on, and an important point this article makes, is that disability-support program staff are faltering under the weight of the sheer number of students receiving support. But, even if true, why is that the student’s fault? There is no proof in this piece that disabled students who would meet the definition of “traditionally disabled” are losing out because more students are getting extra time on exams. 

The data doesn’t back this up. In fact, this story is the equivalent of an exposé of the food-stamp program that reveals that some food benefits recipients buy—gasp!—high-quality cuts of steak or name brands.

In higher education-focused articles like this one, with rare exceptions, students are always deemed the problem. It’s easy to place blame at the feet of pesky lazy 18-22 year olds, who the media tell us use ChatGPT to write term papers and fake disabilities to get over.

But maybe, just maybe, the higher education system is finally correcting for decades of actively ableist approaches to teaching students and that process includes some growing pains.