More students are reporting disabilities — and getting A’s.
More students are reporting disabilities — and getting A’s.
A nother scandal is ripping through higher education. The Atlantic magazine reports that Stanford University has an extraordinarily vulnerable student body, with 38 percent registering with the school as having some form of disability. At Amherst, the number is 34 percent.
That’s almost double the rate of the rather fragile student bodies at Harvard and Brown (20 percent disabled), and nearly five times that at MIT (8 percent). And it’s important to note that not all students who report a disability formally register with their campus, so the number with a disability (such as ADHD) may be higher than what schools report.
Most students claim learning disabilities, such as anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
What accounts for the increase? No one knows for sure, but Reason magazine notes that “the current language of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) allows students to get expansive accommodations with little more than a doctor’s note.” In turn, colleges allow students who register as disabled extra time on tests and other benefits.
Meanwhile, ABC News reports on a study at Yale by economist Ray Fair showing that most students in all majors get “A” grades, with the proportion highest in such fashionably woke fields as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (92 percent) and sociology (74 percent), while lowest in such nerdy traditional disciplines as economics (52 percent), mathematics (55 percent), and chemistry (62 percent).
While historical data are limited, that data plus anecdotes from professors suggest that the percentage of disabled students has risen substantially — from well under 5 percent virtually everywhere a half century ago — while the proportion of “A” grades has at least tripled. Have students become dramatically more fragile and vulnerable physically and emotionally, but simultaneously much more brilliantly knowledgeable?
The reality is that Generation Z students are having fewer and fewer encounters with books than ever. They thus arrive in today’s classrooms unable to complete assigned reading at the same level as previous students. It’s leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations.
Government time-use survey data suggest today’s students spend far less time on academics than earlier, so it is virtually certain that students are getting much higher grades for far less learning. Doing less for more.
The real problem is the decline in integrity and honesty associated with moving from a “Can Do Anything” national mentality to one that treats its youth like delicate snowflakes rather than humans needing challenges to prepare them for a life that includes leadership responsibilities.
Elementary and high school teachers trained in our universities are turning out students today who perform poorly on international tests, leading probably for the first time to our having a generation of young adults who have less general knowledge than their parents.
Whenever it seems like the actions of the Trump administration to reign in the costly and harmful practices of our universities may be going too far, new data reaffirm the general correctness of the administration’s approach. One example: The latest results of international testing of teenagers in mathematics (the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study results) show American student performance levels behind those of many other nations and declining over time.
These American high school kids, in turn, were taught by teachers whose skills were derived from college-trained professors. Our colleges are doing less for more, obfuscating or even lying about the performance of their own students. Moral of the story: Raise, not lower, the pressure on the colleges to reform.
John Fund is National Review’s national affairs reporter. Richard Vedder is a professor emeritus at Ohio University and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.