> Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.
buries the lede, at least for Stanford. It is incredibly commonplace for students to "get an OAE" (Office of Accessible Education) exclusively to get a single room. Moreover, residential accommodations allow you to be placed in housing prior to the general population and thus grant larger (& better) housing selection.
I would not be surprised if a majority of the cited Stanford accommodations were not used for test taking but instead used exclusively for housing (there are different processes internally for each).
edit: there is even a practice of "stacking" where certain disabilities are used to strategically reduce the subset of dorms in which you can live, to the point where the only intersection between your requirements is a comfy single, forcing Admin to put you there. It is well known, for example, that a particularly popular dorm is the nearest to the campus clinic. If you can get an accommodation requiring proximity to the clinic, you have narrowed your choices to that dorm or another. One more accommodation and you are guaranteed the good dorm.
Schools and universities have made accommodations a priority for decades. It started with good intentions, but parents and students alike have noticed that it's both a) easy to qualify for a disability and b) provides significant academic advantages if you do.
Another big accommodation request is extra time on tests. At many high schools and universities, getting more time than your peers to take tests is as simple as finding a doctor who will write the write things in a note for you. Some universities grant special permissions to record lectures to students with disabilities, too.
If you don't have a disability, you aren't allowed to record lectures and you have to put your pencil down at the end of the normal test window. As you can imagine, when a high percentage of the student body gets to stay longer for a hard test, the wheels start turning in students' heads as they realize cheating is being normalized and they're being left behind by not getting that doctors' note.
The rampant abuse is really becoming a problem for students with true disabilities. As you can imagine, when the disability system is faced with 1/3 of the student body registering for disability status the limited number of single rooms and other resources will inevitably get assigned to people who don't need it while some who actually do need it are forced to go without.
Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.
A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.
The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.
As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.
Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.
Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.
I had a friend's wife gas-light him into thinking he is on the spectrum and that many of his friends from college are as well... A well established and respected engineering school in the US. I'm not saying there aren't people there who would most likely fall onto it, but being detail oriented or interested in science and engineering enough to get credentialed in it being a signifier of autism was just sheer lunacy.
It really is frustrating how fast our society devalues and dilutes the meaning of any word these days.
Normies have since invaded and finding someone to geek out with has become hard. (No one wants to discuss the finer points of CPU architectures anymore!)