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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

You can get all sorts of extra accommodations at school and work now if you're diagnosed with a disability. Disability rates have thus exploded. I support giving reasonable accommodations to people who are truly disabled but we have medicalized a lot of minor stuff that people ought to just "power through".

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-st...

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Alternatively, we are gatekeeping basic decency behind having a diagnosed disability.

Could you define basic decency for us? Should every college student receive a private dorm room and unlimited time on exams?

I mean, sure, why not?

Sounds good. How about a free emotional support pony while we're at it?

And people wonder why college tuition prices are so high.

There are only two ways to give everyone a private dorm room:

1. Drastically reduce admissions until a 1:1 ratio of rooms to students is achieved. Once rooms are full, you have to reject students. Overall college admissions is cut significantly.

2. Massively increase tuitions so that more single-occupancy rooms can be built

So which one do you choose? I suspect most of these proposals rely on a world where money is infinite and nothing has to be sacrificed to get there.

Umm.. these elite universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars in endowment funds. They can easily build dorm rooms if they care to - especially given the universities already own the land and have vast amounts of unused land.

I think there is a fallacy to look at endowments like they are checking accounts. Or to assume elite universities generally have unused land or can rebuild a large amount of their dorms for less than hundreds of millions of dollars and significant disruption to campus life

Or make all the rooms smaller single rooms rather than intentionally building all the rooms as doubles?

Or don't require students (especially freshmen) to live in dorms so more people can live in apartments off campus to reduce the need for dorm rooms?

That’s not actually feasible. It’s cost prohibitive to refactor all the shared dorms and/or tear down and rebuild a significant fraction of on campus spaces.

Just two options huh? Who's agenda are you pushing?

Are you being serious? Because it’s cost prohibitive to the university and undermines the ability for educators to evaluate student performance.

Imagine being the TA that has to proctor an examination that takes an indefinite amount of time.

I understand your sentiment but it seems like you’re avoiding the harsh reality of things. And these things are not that “harsh” in the grand scheme of things.

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