{shortcode-2930f68935ad76af5877b3c65edefbddfcd4ab34}
Updated December 8, 2025, at 4:47 p.m.
Roughly a fifth of undergraduate students at Harvard received disability accommodations last year — an increase of more than 15 percentage points over the past decade, according to data published annually by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The rise — from roughly three percent in 2014 to 21 percent in 2024 — brings the share of undergraduate students receiving accommodations at Harvard in line with the national average, which has consistently hovered around 20 percent.
The prevalence has sparked suspicion from some faculty and in the national media that some students are using accommodations to eke out advantages, like extra time on tests, that their peers don’t receive.
Harvard has drawn particular scrutiny as one of several elite four-year colleges that have seen their share of students receiving accommodations increase significantly — particularly after an article published in The Atlantic last week called attention to the rates at Harvard.
But staff at Harvard’s University Disability Resources say the increase is, in part, the result of a concerted push to lower barriers to access student resources, as well as decreased stigma around disabilities.
{shortcode-c9a432418e19e85595da7d85178f381fb6c76aaa}
According to Kate Upatham, senior director of the UDR — which serves as a central resource for Harvard affiliates seeking disability-related resources and information — the office has loosened its requirements for students seeking accommodations in recent years. The UDR has also been trying to publicize its resources and increase awareness around disability on campus, including through annual celebrations of Disability Pride Month that began in 2021.
It’s possible that some students are gaming the system, said Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights law professor at Harvard Law School, but the change likely also reflects that students with disabilities are more empowered to seek out resources — and that universities are rethinking how they educate and support disabled students.
“As society evolves, universities evolve as well, and we learn to better assess students and better utilize the ways that we teach and learn together and grade people,” Stein said.
But other affiliates expressed concern that the College’s current system for academic accommodations — which includes policies like extra time to complete exams and written assignments — is preventing students from getting the most benefit out of their Harvard education.
“The whole system of accommodations for things other than physical disabilities just seems badly mismatched with the educational purposes that students and faculty share,” former Harvard College dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 said, drawing a distinction between accommodations such as extra time — often offered for conditions such as ADHD or anxiety — and other types of accommodations.
The NCES does not distinguish between types of accommodation in the data it collects from universities. But academic accommodations, particularly extra time, have drawn far more attention than the many other services available to students with disabilities, such as wheelchair-accessible housing or braille translations. Accommodations for cognitive disabilities and mental health conditions have also drawn more scrutiny than accommodations for physical disabilities.
Stephen T. Hall-Nunez ’28, the co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Disability Justice Club, said he thinks that such distinctions have been used to suggest that some students’ disabilities are not legitimate reasons to receive accommodations.
“It is really interesting how they keep basically comparing the reasons for accommodations that are more like psychological or cognitive processing — they keep comparing that with wheelchairs, as if that’s somehow that’s a comparison to a quote-unquote ‘real disability,’” Hall-Nunez, who is a wheelchair user, said in response to the Atlantic article.
Rates of diagnosis for ADHD, anxiety, and depression, which are classified as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act, have gone up in recent years. Part of the increase has been attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which rates of mental illnesses among young people in particular increased significantly.
But not all students who use disability accommodations at Harvard receive accommodations on testing. A. Amadeus Martin, who teaches Math 21a: “Multivariable Calculus,” wrote in an email that the NCES numbers “don’t ring true based on the number of students who need accommodations in the courses I run.”
Out of the 423 registered students in Martin’s courses this term, less than 5 percent have exam accommodations, and some choose not to use the accommodations so they can take tests in the same setting as their peers, he wrote.
Former Government professor Matthew L. Blackwell, who taught Gov 50: “Data Science for the Social Sciences” for four years, wrote in an X post responding to the Atlantic story that he likewise did not see high rates of students using accommodations in his course.
“I taught a fairly large undergraduate class at Harvard and I did not have 20% of students seeking accommodations,” Blackwell wrote.
Lewis said he wasn’t sure how much most students benefited from extra time on exams, saying that he had observed many of his own students either arriving at answers quickly or not at all. But he wrote in an email that he worried extensions were “not preparing students for life in the world where you simply can’t be given double time to complete work tasks.”
Hall-Nunez pushed back on the idea that accommodations like extra time provided a significant advantage to students, arguing that the focus of college exams is usually on knowing the content, rather than testing students’ ability to finish in a certain time.
“Is our goal of like, giving people exams to weed out the people that are too slow?” Hall-Nunez said. “Like, is that what we want to achieve from this?”
Annabel L. Kim, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, wrote in an email that she expected the number of students receiving disability accommodations to keep climbing due to rising rates of disabilities after the Covid-19 pandemic, which she described as a “mass disabling event.”
“Rather than fight accommodations, we should be thinking about how to accommodate more students, some of whom may not even realize they are disabled because of how ableist our society is,” Kim wrote.
—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.
—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.
