From the Community | The real reason 40% of Stanford students are “disabled”

Lindsey Meservey is a sixth-year Biology PhD student. She has lived in Stanford graduate housing since 2019.

Stanford has recently been in the news for having over 40% of its undergraduates claim a disability. It started with an article in The Atlantic, then another in Fortune, a sensationalist response by student Elsa Johnson in The Times and recently another in The San Francisco Chronicle. The media has seized on the idea that disabilities are the new way for students to paint themselves as victims and cheat the system.

This idea is starkly different from the hard-working Stanford undergraduate population I know, who always seem to be asking what more they can do rather than less. While I do not doubt a few students may seek unneeded academic accommodations, the media frenzy misses the real, far more bureaucratic story. The vast majority of disability claims are not about getting extra time on tests — they are about navigating a uniquely restrictive housing system.

Nationally, about 16% of undergraduate students live on campus. This number is higher for private universities (43%) and lower for community colleges (a mere 1.5%). Most state schools I know provide first-year dorms and then leave upperclass housing to the free market. Students can live in furnished university housing, an unfurnished apartment down the street, a nearby relative’s house or a cardboard box so long as it has a mailing address. Students can sign up for a full meal plan at the university dining hall, or a partial one or none at all. Medically motivated housing accommodations are mostly limited to emotional support animals and are usually worked out with the landlord, not the school itself. While this state school structure gives room for class disparity, it also provides greater flexibility and autonomy. 

Stanford, however, operates on a different model: Residential & Dining Enterprise (R&DE) guarantees four years of on-campus housing to undergraduate students. 98% of undergrads accept this offer due to a combination of convenience, social benefits and subsidized cost means.

Students living on campus generally need a medical reason for any changes from the default in housing and dining, including upgrading the mattress or desk to something more comfortable, running the AC during triple-digit heat waves, living in a private room, eating home-cooked meals and keeping a pet. Schools with similarly high disability rates, like Hampshire College, also have extremely high rates of students living on-campus. I would guess their accommodation system works similarly.

Stanford’s system does not encourage students to claim disabilities to get “hidden perks”; it forces them to claim disabilities to gain basic comfort and autonomy. At most other U.S. universities, a student wishing for a private room can just sign a contract for a private room. No endometriosis diagnosis needed! A student wishing to cook their own food could, without converting to Jainism!

My own experience in graduate student housing illustrates this phenomenon. For the past seven years, my family and I have lived in graduate student housing. For the most part, we have loved it. But I have been consistently exasperated by the bureaucracy of on-campus housing. I learned soon after my son was born that being three weeks old during a triple-digit heat wave is not, in the R&DE’s mind, grounds for installing a portable AC unit. Yet when we submitted documentation of my son’s eczema, our request was quickly approved.

Stanford undergrads encounter similar frustrations, and they use their smarts and social capital to work through them. They use real, if manageable, medical conditions to justify accommodations that would just be options at nearly any other university. A student with a food sensitivity registers with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE) because they want more variety in their diet than the standard meal plan offers. A student with occasional migraines registers with OAE because they want privacy. A student with dust allergies registers with OAE because they want a more comfortable mattress.

These types of students hardly consider themselves “disabled” the way the media imagines. Nor are they trying to gain an unfair academic advantage over their classmates. The 40% figure isn’t a sign of moral decay; it’s an artifact of institutional design. It reflects a generation of students cleverly navigating a system that has turned basic life choices into medical hurdles.

In his op-ed responding to Elsa Johnson, Rob Henderson praises an injured Air Force veteran who refused to claim disability, asserting the virtue of self-determination. The irony is that Stanford students must do the very opposite for the same reason: to gain self-determination within Stanford’s housing system — the ability to choose a private room, cook their own meals, or run an AC — students must leverage medical diagnoses. In other words, Stanford students must surrender their self-sufficiency on paper to achieve it in practice.

The post From the Community | The real reason 40% of Stanford students are “disabled” appeared first on The Stanford Daily.