15-20% of the world is estimated to have a disability. So Stanford population is high, but approximately double the average of a random global population sample.
Now, think about the selection pressures Stanford applies. Stanford selects students who are fighting for top academic honors. Those students are dealing with brutal competition, and likely see their future as hanging on their ability to secure one of a small number of slots in the school. Anxiety would be genuinely higher in the student body than, say, students at a mid rate state school.
Stanford wants students with strong test scores, especially those who are strongly capable in mathematics. High spatial awareness, cognitive integration, and working memory can be positive traits in some autistic people and some find strong success in standardized environments and in mathematics.
We're also improving diagnostic tools for autism and ADHD, and recognizing that the tools we used missed a lot of cases in young women, because they present differently than for young men.
Imagine a house party where the guests are selected at random from MIT or Stanford, then imagine you selected guests at random from, say, all Americans. Are you telling me you'd be surprised if the MIT and Stanford crowd had a noticeably different population demographic than the overall American population?
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
However, big caveat - it's self-reported. If you look at how many people get disability benefit it's around 10%.
So whether or not that is true depends entirely on what you mean by "disability" which is obviously not a well defined term.
World Health Organization: 16%
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-...
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: 15%
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/f...
CDC: 25% of Americans
https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...
ROD Group: 22%
https://www.rod-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Glo...
Stanford's rate is 4.3x higher than that.
Add in that half of all students who claim a disability have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college, all the reports of rampant cheating in school, the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal where some parents helped their kid fake disabilities to get ahead, and even people here who seem to think it's ok to defraud the system to get ahead?
I think perhaps elite schools need a better way to gauge an applicant's ethics to deny them entry since the last thing the world needs is more unethical people in positions of power.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2024/comm/disa...
I don't know about the UK, but in the US, in order to get social security disability, you need to have a documented disability and there's also income limits. If you have a disability, but you manage to find a career despite the disability, you'll lose eligibility for social security disability or at least you'll lose the social security payments. Depending on the disabilities in question, I think it's reasonable that 60% of people with a disability can find work that pays enough that they are no longer eligible for a disability payment and/or they've reached the age where they get a retirement/old age insurance benefit rather than disability.
Stanford is not a random sample of the global population. Most notably, Stanford undergraduates are young, primarily between 18-24[1]. 8.7% of people in the US from ages 18-29 have a disability [2].
[1] https://www.meetyourclass.com/stanford/student-population
[2] https://askearn.org/page/statistics-on-disability#:~:text=8....
You are perhaps mistaking which side of the line Stanford would select for. It is a school that produces and prefers sociopaths. Its engineering curriculum, almost uniquely among universities, has no requirement for an ethics course. You can fulfill Stanford's "Technology in Society" requirement by taking a course where you network with VCs for a semester. It is a factory for making jerks.
If 1 in 5 are obese, would it be fair to assume that 1 in 5 Olympic runners are also obese?
Albert Einstein was a smart guy and very accomplished… yet his wife had to paint is house door red so he knew where he lived. He very likely had what we would now call ASD. While he was brilliant and a top university would love people like that, he needed some accommodations, such as a red front door.
Broadening the definition makes it less useful in many ways. I would consider "disabled" to mean one of: - Unable to ambulate effectively (requires crutches or worse) - Unable to look after oneself as an adult (for any combination of reasons) - Unable to use tools and items most people would consider standard - eg. can't hold a pencil, write, type, whatever.
That's a fairly harsh definition of disabled, but all of these people unambiguously require accommodation because of their incapacity. It's also off the top of my head, so I'd happily broaden it if you want to argue the point.
If I can talk to someone for an entire day and not realise or notice they are disabled in some way, I question the definition being used - how helpful is it in deciding how we should allocate additional resources and help in that case?