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In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic<\/em> (the newly published \u201c<\/em>Accommodation Nation\u201d), The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> (\u201cAre Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal<\/em> (\u201cColleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help\u201d) and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed<\/em> itself (\u201cHow Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?\u201d) speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.<\/p>\n As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia\u2014a professional organization for staff of disability service offices\u2014It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific \u201ctype\u201d of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the \u201cDo Colleges Over-Accommodate?\u201d piece.<\/p>\n It is common to see these claims begin from an assumption that disability accommodations \u201care skyrocketing\u201d\u2014a claim that sensationalizes statistics. One author cites the large volume of accommodation letters sent by a university per semester. Such a claim is rooted in either misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of accommodations. At any institution, the total count of all accommodation letters sent appears disproportionately large, because each student is enrolled in multiple courses.<\/p>\n A better accounting would come from data on the representation of disabled students within the institution. Recent National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) data shows that among public, 4-year institutions, 10.1\u00a0percent of them report that students with disabilities make up 10\u00a0percent or more of their student population. This is an increase from the 1.5\u00a0percent of institutions in 2010\u20132011, but why is it shocking that disabled students also want to go to universities that their nondisabled peers attend?<\/p>\n The NCES data do suggest that disabled students are more likely to enroll in private institutions (more than 23\u00a0percent of private nonprofit colleges report that students with disabilities make up 10\u00a0percent or more of their student population). While this is supportive of a claim that students from privileged backgrounds have higher access to accommodations (and indeed, research supports this) it is telling that authors who put elite institutions in the spotlight are more focused on reducing accommodations available to these students than on increasing the support available to students at less elite institutions.<\/p>\n It is also important to view these figures in the context of the post-ADA era. The ADA is only 35 years old, and its amendments passed in 2008. Today\u2019s students come from an environment where they are more likely to expect accessibility, which is reflected in these \u201cskyrocketing\u201d\u2014or \u201cbreathtaking\u201d\u2014numbers.<\/p>\n In our review of the \u201cDo Colleges Over-Accommodate\u201d archetype, we saw a clear pattern of essential recurring arguments:<\/p>\n In these arguments, we see unfortunate parallels to other attacks on civil rights playing out in our public discourse. Each individual claim requires a full-throated counterargument\u2014which we will provide below.<\/p>\n This is the most prevalent claim within these articles, and we will spend the greatest effort defusing it. This claim suggests that all accommodations create advantages for students with disabilities\u2014that we should fear for \u201cfairness,\u201d or that accommodations will compromise rigor. In this piece, the author asserts that additional testing time for students with disabilities \u201cis as unfair to other students as a head start would be to other runners.\u201d<\/p>\n This metaphor reveals a flawed assumption\u2014that education is inherently a place of competition, with a fixed number of winners and losers. A zero-sum game. But universities are not limited in their capacity to provide degrees, nor is there a fixed number of A\u2019s available.<\/p>\n Still, there is value in ensuring fairness. Disability services officers (DSOs) develop rigorous criteria for assessing and analyzing cases where academic accommodations would \u201cfundamentally alter\u201d key aspects of courses. DSOs also seek to apply a measured approach to approval of accommodations, consistent with professional guidance. The purpose of accommodations\u2014to return to the metaphor\u2014is ensuring that students run in the same race.<\/p>\n Research such as this 2022 U.K.-based study, which found that accommodations in most cases \u201cworked as intended and helped [with] leveling the playing field,\u201d challenges this narrative further.<\/p>\n The work of DSOs relies on an interactive <\/em>process at the individual level. A student who is dyslexic may benefit from a dictation tool for writing essays in a way that another would not. A student who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may benefit from a quiet testing environment\u2014but not all students with the same diagnosis would have the same needs. The individualized identification and selection of supports to address disability-specific barriers is the cornerstone of DSO work, and it is work that our offices conduct effectively.<\/p>\n Running through these articles is an implicit\u2014at times explicit\u2014assumption that DSOs are either tricked by students and their medical providers into approving accommodations inappropriately, or that students deliberately misuse even appropriate accommodations. Implicitly, this assumption is communicated to readers through less-than-subtle reliance on words like \u201cclaim\u201d for how students communicate their disability, rather than \u201cdisclose.\u201d Explicitly, this line of argument appeals to scholarship debating the ways in which individual disabilities are defined.<\/p>\n Some of the most-cited sources in support of this claim are of questionable reliability. For example, this article from the Canadian Journal Psychological Injury and Law<\/em> has been held as \u201csobering\u201d evidence that DSOs are insufficiently rigorous in approving accommodations. In the study, researchers asked DSO staff if they would accommodate a fictitious prospective student based solely on what the researchers deemed insufficient documentation.<\/p>\n Setting aside gaps in context between Canada and the U.S., what a DSO professional would hypothetically do and what they would do when presented with a live student are different. Our professional guidelines encourage the use of self-report, triangulated with other forms of information. Without following a student through the interactive process, the authors project bias and incorrect assumptions onto the work of DSO professionals\u2014just as asking a doctor to suggest treatment without an exam would likely produce similarly \u201csobering\u201d results.<\/p>\n The inaccuracy of this claim is likely to be apparent to anyone involved in accommodations review. Moreover, some of the sources cited by proponents of this claim directly contradict it. For example, Ashley Yull\u2019s 2015 article about the intersection of race class, and disability notes:<\/p>\n \u201cPremising access to accommodations in post-secondary education on receipt of a psychiatric diagnosis magnifies the negative impact of childhood poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n And Bea Waterfield and Emma Whelan observed in their 2017 article:<\/p>\n \u201cSES [socioeconomic status] contributes to the experience of disadvantage for learning disabled students when they lack the financial means to obtain required diagnoses.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no wonder that scholars would dispute that documentation is a lever for equity, given the staggering cost of psychological assessments. There is variance in the pricing of these assessments, but in some areas they can cost between $1,000 and $5,000. While some university-operated assessment centers can be less costly, they typically have very long waiting lists. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 dependent undergraduate students come from families below the poverty line\u2014and nearly half of independent students (those without financial support from family) met this criterion.<\/p>\n Financial cost is not the only barrier to accessing rigorous documentation. Mental health providers experience significant demand, stretching wait times and disproportionately impacting rural and marginalized communities.<\/p>\n If DSOs demanded that each student claiming a learning disability or ADHD diagnosis supply such a document, accommodations would be unavailable to poorer students and to many students from rural areas. For all students, the provision of accommodations would be delayed. This is why those working as DSOs are often so willing to work with students when they can articulate an access barrier. To claim otherwise can be understood as either a statement of ignorance about disability services or, perhaps, as reflective of a desire for accommodation requests to diminish.<\/p>\n As we noted, our goal is to present a measured response to these opinion essays. Having done so, we will do our readers the service of stating our own view:<\/p>\n We encourage readers to draw their own conclusions\u2014however, in doing so, we encourage you to listen to the voices of the disabled community, disability services professionals, and those with stakes and experience in navigating the accommodations process.<\/p>\n In the current climate, where we are asked to consider whether empathy might be a sin, and whether disability might be incongruent with merit in the workplace, it is important to uplift these voices. It is important to stand firm in the knowledge of the expertise and value of those in helping professions. It is important to affirm that all means all, and that includes students with disabilities.<\/p>\n Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek are the president-elect and president, respectively, of the Association on Higher Education and Disability in Virginia.<\/em> <\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published \u201cAccommodation Nation\u201d), The Chronicle of Higher Education (\u201cAre Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal (\u201cColleges Bend the Rules for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4673,6850,1326,440,20793],"class_list":{"0":"post-37718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-colleges","9":"tag-disabilities","10":"tag-dont","11":"tag-opinion","12":"tag-overaccommodate"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Setting the Table With Statistics<\/h2>\n
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