The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

This is the theme for most of the article, disability diagnosis as tool for the elite kids to jockey ahead of the other elite kids. The problem here is that is the opposite of what the headline and subheadline are implying; “Accommodation Nation”, this is a whole country issue, not one of just the Ivy Plus, “America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem”, colleges writ large experience this. They’re casting doubt on the validity of all neurodivergent claims up top and then only let on a few paragraphs down that it’s a much narrower issue.

“If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”

I don’t buy this argument because real world problem solving doesn’t look like a college test. College test, 90 minutes, no talking to your neighbors about the problem. Real world, at worst you’re talking end of day deadlines, usually days or weeks, and active collaboration with colleagues is encouraged.

More generally, I’d just like to point out the double speak of TPTB loving neurodivergence when it means hyper fixating on debugging code for 10 hours straight, but when it comes to needing the slightest variation in academic environment suddenly they’ve got a problem with it.