Last week, Arizona State University’s provost sent faculty another familiar message ahead of the spring semester: Ensure all digital course materials meet accessibility standards. After 25 years teaching philosophy at ASU, I’m well aware of the institution’s growth and its long-standing commitment to accessibility. That commitment, in itself, is not controversial.
But recent data should give universities serious pause.
A society can medicalize despair, bureaucratize despair, and accommodate despair. None of that answers the question despair is asking.
Two reports — one from the Harvard Crimson and another from the Atlantic — put numbers to what many faculty have observed for years. At Harvard, 21% of undergraduates received disability accommodations in 2024, up from roughly 3% a decade earlier. The Crimson notes that Harvard is now aligned with a national average hovering around 20%.
The Atlantic goes further, describing what it calls an “age of accommodation” at elite schools. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of students are registered as disabled. At Amherst, the figure reaches 34%. The most common accommodation, professors report, is extra time on exams.
When disability becomes elastic
To be clear, accommodations for genuine physical disabilities are not in dispute. A wheelchair ramp is not a moral scandal. A student with a real impairment should not be excluded from education. That principle remains sound.
What has changed is the nature of disability itself.
Both articles describe a shift away from visible, physical impairments toward diagnoses that are invisible, elastic, and difficult to distinguish from ordinary hardship in a competitive academic environment. ADHD, anxiety, and depression now dominate accommodation requests, treated as qualifying disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act framework. The Crimson ties much of this surge to the COVID era, quoting one professor who described the pandemic as a “mass disabling event.”
That explanation may be partly true. Many students are not gaming the system; they are shaped by it. But even granting that, the trend raises three problems universities can no longer dodge.
The fairness and standards problems
First is fairness. When extra time becomes widespread — especially among high-performing, well-resourced students — faculty are right to wonder whether accommodations are providing access or advantage.
The Crimson acknowledges faculty suspicion that accommodations are used to “eke out advantages.” The Atlantic warns that a system designed to level the playing field can begin to distort the very meaning of fairness.
Second is standards. If a significant share of students receive individualized modifications — extra time, deadline extensions, alternate testing environments — then faculty must ask an uncomfortable question administrators prefer to avoid: Is the course still the same course?
Exams exist to measure knowledge and skill under shared constraints. Remove those constraints for many students, and results no longer mean the same thing. At best, the system becomes two-track. At worst, rigor is quietly redefined as cruelty and education collapses into credentialing.
The deeper crisis
Third — and most important — is meaning.
If vast numbers of young adults now pass through education labeled as anxious and depressed, and if that diagnosis becomes the gateway to academic survival, we should ask what kind of culture we have built. What account of life, purpose, and human flourishing are students receiving in K-12 and college?
For years, students have been immersed in a worldview that frames them primarily as victims — of structures, systems, identities, and histories beyond their control. They are told meaning is socially constructed, morality is relative, and human beings are little more than biological accidents shaped by power. Hardship, in this framework, becomes pathology. Suffering becomes injustice. Endurance becomes oppression.
At that point, anxiety and depression cease to be merely medical categories. They become rational responses to a life stripped of purpose.
Education with meaning
Here the philosopher cannot remain silent. A society can medicalize despair, bureaucratize despair, and accommodate despair. None of that answers the question despair is asking.
Have we taught students how to face difficulty? To endure frustration? To pursue excellence despite pain? Or have we trained them to interpret hardship as harm — and then rewarded that interpretation with institutional permission slips?
The philosopher Westley (disguised as the Dread Pirate Roberts) said, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But there is suffering, and there is suffering well to attain what is good. We stopped teaching this, and the young adults are experiencing the consequences.
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Universities love to talk about “student success.” But education is not merely success. It is formation. And formation requires truth: truth about what a human being is, what suffering is for, what excellence demands, and what life ultimately aims at.
When universities exile God, moral realism, and any shared account of human purpose, they should not be surprised when students seek refuge in medicalized identities that turn pain into paperwork.
This crisis is not simply about abuse of accommodations or even about mental health statistics. It is about whether higher education can still tell students the truth: that limits are not always oppression, that hardship is not always injustice, that discipline precedes freedom, and that meaning is discovered, not administered.
If universities cannot say why education aims at the highest good, then they should not be shocked when students conclude it means nothing — and despair follows.
It is time to return education to what it was meant to be: the formation of souls ordered toward wisdom and virtue.
