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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> the original article is factually incorrect. Accommodations at Stanford are only 25% of students, according to their website, and that includes every possible kind of accommodation,

The original article said 38% students are registered with the disability office, not that 38% of students have accommodations.

Not all students registered with the disability office receive accommodations all of the time.

25% is still a very, very high number. The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range. From the article:

> According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years.

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> The number of public universities is in the 3-4% range.

The National Center for Education Statistics disagrees with 3-4%.

  In 2019–20, some 21 percent of undergraduates and 11 percent of 
  postbaccalaureate students reported having a disability. . .

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=60

That's a different statistic. Not all students who report having a disability on a survey will be registered with their school's disability office.

Fair enough. I formerly went through large schools' reported numbers, which isn't the most straightforward thing to find. UT Austin has 4,299 registered Spring of 2025, which is 12.9% of a 55k student population. Ohio has 5,724 of a total of 66,901, so 8%. FSU is ~5,000 of ~55,000: 10%. These are all much higher than the article's claim but definitely lower than the NCES survey.

https://disability.utexas.edu/statistics/

https://irp.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/01/20...

https://dsst.fsu.edu/oas

This cites an NCES study which doesn't appears to be locked down to approved researchers, but it provides a national number:

> In 2019-20, 8% of students registered as having a disability with their institution. This rate was 10% at non-proﬁt institutions, 7% at for-proﬁt institutions, and 7% of students at public institutions.

https://pnpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/StudentswithDisa...

A public two-year college? So, a community college? That's a much more specific claim than that being the case for public universities overall.

yes, the original article is a flat out bullshit lie

https://oae.stanford.edu/students/dispelling-myths-about-oae

it's 25% registered, not 38%. How do you get this number wrong when Stanford has it on their website? how does that even happen?

this number includes literally every type of possible accommodation. A shitty carpet in your room is included, an accommodation for a peanut allergy is included. This is a 90 plus a year private school, I think it's fine that you can get a shitty carpet replaced in a way maybe you couldn't at University of Akron ? what's the problem? it's a nothingnburger.

the point is the article is somehow implying that 38% of students get some weird special treatment but that just is not the case

Your link doesn't say "25%". It's also not an official, up-to-date statistics resource. It's website copy for the office of accessible education

The "1 in 4" number has been there as far back as Wayback Machine has that paged archived (2023): http://web.archive.org/web/20230628165315/https://oae.stanfo...

So it's definitely not a precise statistic, and it's likely out of date.

1 in 4 is 25%

it's on their website. Along with all the other details. where is 38% coming from that is a better source than Stanford's own website. At a minumum the article should have said where they got that number and why it disagrees with Stanford's own number.

And again, it includes every possible kind of accommodation under the sun. Which is totally fine and not an issue of any kind.

The Atlantic journalist talked to Stanford Professor Paul Graham Fisher who was co-chair of the university’s disability task force, so I imagine they either got it from him or someone else at the school.

They could have made it up, but since the article is a couple days old and no one has printed any retraction or correction, I'm more inclined to believe the number is accurate.

The number isn’t sourced. But the article does say 24% were receiving academic OR housing accommodation. So 38% registered disabled but only 24% receiving any type of accommodations sounds suspiciously like bullshit. It would require people registering and not using the thing they registered for.

But most importantly, the OR plays a big role here. Where is the data on how many people are using academic accommodations ? Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd. The article heavily implies that people are somehow using these accommodations to gain an academic advantage, when in fact 24% of people use any kind of accommodation, which includes dirty carpet replacement.

There are any number of reasons for that to be the case.

1) Someone who registers may not provide sufficient documentation to be eligible for accommodation 2) Not all disabilities require housing or academic accommodation - instead they may get things like parking passes, transportation and assistive technology 3) Returning students could have requested accommodation in prior years, but no longer require/desire it 4) What "registration" is could be something different than registering with the OAE 5) The number could be wrong or misleading.

> Complaining that people at a 90k a year school receive a housing accommodation is just frankly absurd.

Personally, I don't think complaints about defrauding schools are absurd because of tuition costs. Frankly, that anyone thinks fraud is ethical for the wealthy is disturbing.

you are talking complete nonsense, sorry. Nobody pays full tuition at Stanford unless you are rich, it's literally free for families making less than 150k a year.

there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting parking passes, transportation and assistive technology if you are eligible for it and there is no indication fraud here is involved. So, apologies, but your comments here are totally irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article is very much making it sound like people are getting accommodations to get better grades, not to get better parking. If it was simply about better parking, there would not be a story.

> 1 in 4 is 25%

N in M fractions are used in casual copy to convey an approximate value. Finding a "1 in 4" number on a dated website does not mean that the current number is literally 25%.

It's an approximation and not meant to be taken as a precise value. They're not going to update the website to "26 out of 100" if the number changes.

Citing an old, approximate number in some non-specific website copy does not invalidate anything.

You are nitpicking. By that logic, since we can never know the precise number because that number is always moving, we simply don’t know what the number is and all this is moot.

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