“More students are receiving disability accommodations at the University of California at Berkeley this school year, the leading type being for ‘Psychological/Emotional’ disabilities,” reports The College Fix. The data
shows the number of students who received disability accommodations increasing every year. In 2020-2021, there were 4,153. The following year there were 4,585. This year, there are 5,711. The greatest percentage of disabled students this year have “psychological” or “emotional” impediments. There are 2,528, more than 50 percent of all students with disabilities at the university.
The next most common is ADHD/ADD, with 1,675 students. According to the data, 287 students have a learning disability, 290 face mobility problems, 71 struggle to hear, and 63 have impaired vision….
Other universities are exhibiting similar trends…. at Stanford University, 38 percent of students are registered as disabled, and many students at colleges across the U.S. now receive extra time on exams…
Alvin Christian, a predoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan…found that “usage has risen sharply.”…“between 2011 and 2024, the share of students approved for accommodations more than doubled… that growth is accompanied by accommodations for mental health diagnoses in college, which quadrupled during this time period.”
“Men and Asian students are half as likely to use accommodations (relative to women and white students, respectively).”… “low-income and high-income students are more likely to use [accommodations] compared to their middle-income peers.”…“These gaps are not due to underlying differences in disability rates across these groups (proxying for disability with K-12 disability status), and is instead driven by application behavior.”…“accommodations yield substantial benefits. Approved students withdraw from fewer courses, earn higher GPAs, persist longer, and are more likely to major in STEM.”
In other news, 81,000 veterans get disability benefits for acne. “About 556,000 veterans receive disability benefits for eczema, 332,000 for hemorrhoids, 110,000 for benign skin growths, 81,000 for acne and 74,000 for varicose veins, the most recently available figures from VA show.” That’s from a recent report in the Washington Post: “Taxpayers will spend roughly $193 billion this year for the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate about 6.9 million disabled veterans on the presumption that their ability to work is impaired….Millions of the claims are for minor or treatable afflictions that rarely hinder employment, such as hair loss, jock itch and toenail fungus.”
Disability claims have mushroomed even as the number of living veterans has fallen by a third over the past quarter century. In 2024, “680,834 veterans were categorized as disabled for allergic rhinitis, or hay fever,” a 22-fold increase since 2006. Payouts for hay fever “can range between $176 and $750 a month.”
