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According to the Daily Caller, the trend was laid bare by Stanford undergraduate Elsa Johnson, who wrote in The Times that “One of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. offers perks to those who say they have ADHD, night terrors, even gluten intolerance. You’d be stupid not to game the system.”
She describes a sprawling “disability accommodation” regime that hands out coveted benefits to those who can secure a qualifying label on paper, including the “best housing on campus,” extended time on exams, lenient attendance policies, and allowances for chronic tardiness.
February 06, 2026
The scale of this phenomenon is striking even by the standards of elite academia, where administrative expansion and identity-based entitlements have become routine. Nearly 4 in 10 Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability, The Atlantic claimed in December 2025, and that same Fall quarter nearly a quarter (24%) of Stanford undergraduates received academic or housing accommodations.
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The pattern is not confined to Stanford. About a fifth of Harvard undergraduates received disability accommodations in the past year, the Harvard Crimson reported in December 2025, with the proportion of “disabled” Harvard undergraduates skyrocketing from 3% to 21% in 2024.
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February 06, 2026
Johnson is blunt about the incentives this system creates and the culture it fosters among students who are supposed to be the nation’s future leaders. “The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. That’s why I decided to claim my legitimate illness — endometriosis — as a disability at Stanford,” Johnson writes.
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Endometriosis, a serious medical condition, “causes tissue that is similar to the lining of the uterus to grow in other places where it doesn’t belong,” according to Cleveland Clinic. It can cause debilitating pelvic pain and heavy periods, and Johnson insists her case is genuine even as she acknowledges the self-interested logic behind formally registering it.
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Her account also hints at a broader generational pattern that raises uncomfortable questions about health, culture, and identity.
An aside: In my experience, Gen Z women are afflicted by chronic illnesses such as endometriosis, irritable bowel syndrome, and Hashimoto’s disease in astonishing numbers, a possible consequence of poor diets or, more darkly, the result of generation-wide Munchausen syndrome.
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Johnson notes that some of her peers present themselves as severely disabled, raising the obvious question of whether such students should be living on campus at all if their conditions are truly that grave. But, she says, “most students, in my experience, claim less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety … Students claim ‘night terrors’; others say they ‘get easily distracted’ or they ‘can’t live with others.’ I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant.”
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Johnson maintains that her own disability is legitimate, yet she is candid that the decision to formalize it through Stanford’s bureaucracy was driven by the tangible benefits on offer.
“That’s why I felt justified in claiming endometriosis as a disability … I’m often doubled over in agony from the problem, for which there is no known cure, so I decided to ask for a single room in a campus dorm where I could endure those moments in private … While I feel entitled to my single room, I would feel guilty about some of the perks I have — except that so many of my fellow students have gamed the system.”
What emerges is a portrait of elite institutions teaching not resilience, responsibility, and self-reliance, but the art of exploiting bureaucratic loopholes without remorse. Stanford itself deserves scrutiny for enabling, and perhaps encouraging, this culture of opportunism, particularly if administrators are driven less by compassion than by fear of litigation from a “disabled” student wielding the Americans with Disabilities Act, whose Title III governs privately funded universities.
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For conservatives who believe higher education should cultivate character as well as intellect, the spectacle of students racing to secure special treatment under ever-expanding disability categories is a warning sign of a deeper moral drift.
When nearly half of an elite student body can claim some form of disability status, the line between genuine need and strategic victimhood blurs, and the university’s mission risks being subordinated to risk management, legal compliance, and the politics of grievance rather than academic excellence and personal responsibility.
