Do students need accommodations for their accommodations?

The number of students with disabilities in higher education has doubled over the past 20 years, primarily because of an increase in students reporting invisible conditions, such as mental health conditions and ADHD. Universities commonly offer these students accommodations such as extended test time, typically in a quiet testing environment; flexible deadlines; and flexible attendance.

Despite how they sound, receiving these accommodations is anything but flexible. Students with disabilities must actively seek out help, plan ahead, stay organised and self-advocate to access these accommodations. This would be demanding for any student but for those whose disabilities inhibit these very skills, they can be impossible to meet.

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First, college students with disabilities are responsible for initiating the process to receive accommodations, in stark contrast to processes used in secondary education. This usually entails booking an appointment with the disability resource centre, gathering enough relevant documentation to show that their disability creates challenges in the classroom, and describing those challenges to the centre’s staff in detail.

The work doesn’t stop there, though. Students also have to navigate several administrative hurdles just to access their accommodations, such as sending their accommodation letters to each of their instructors or remembering to sign up for time in the testing centre weeks in advance. Even routine classroom reminders about due dates, designed with the forgetful student in mind, may no longer apply when students use flexible deadlines, leaving these students responsible for keeping track of their due dates on their own. 

Managing all these responsibilities across four or five courses requires impeccable time management, a sharp short-term memory and close attention to detail – the very skills that can be most disrupted by ADHD and other cognitive disabilities.  

On top of these administrative tasks, the burden also falls on students to ensure they receive the accommodations they are legally entitled to. This puts immense pressure on students with disabilities to not only recognise and articulate the challenges they might experience in a classroom they haven’t yet set foot in (something all students struggle to do) but also the responsibility to assert what they need to instructors and staff. How well a student conveys their needs, both in what they say and how they say it, can shape what accommodations they ultimately get access to.

Although we often frame this as an exercise in self-advocacy, we are actually asking students to accurately identify and describe their needs, then negotiate these needs with people and systems that hold far more power than they do. This is a high bar for any student to meet but that difficulty increases exponentially for students whose disability directly impacts their ability to communicate, read social cues or maintain confidence in high-stakes interactions. We aren’t asking students to “push through” a challenging situation but instead are expecting them to function in ways their disability makes extremely difficult or even impossible.

Despite all this, a student’s ability to initiate, administer and advocate for their accommodations, especially for those without a visible disability, is rarely addressed in accommodation letters. This means if students forget or are unable to request a specific accommodation, they can – and do – lose access to it. 

Instructors see this play out in their classrooms every day. A student perceived as disrespectful or annoying for persistently asking to change their group assignment might actually be an autistic student taking an instructor’s offhand invitation to provide constructive feedback at face value. A student who submits an accommodation letter halfway through the semester might not be lazy; they may have spent weeks paralysed by social anxiety before finding the courage to approach their instructor. Because access to accommodations can determine whether a student passes or fails, a poor grade may reflect not a lack of mastery but the inability of a student with ADHD to remember to schedule an exam at the testing centre two weeks in advance.

At some point, the effort required to maintain accommodations can become unsustainable, or simply not worth the stress, potentially explaining why a majority of students do not disclose their disability to their university. Although that choice should be theirs to make, it should not be driven by an inability to access accommodations. 

Given all this evidence, we have to ask ourselves: is there a need to provide accommodations for accommodations? 

We could debate endlessly how to patch the system, discussing what new accommodations to attach to each accommodation, and how we could provide accommodations for that accommodation, but the core issue is clear: our system is broken. It places unfair burdens on students to initiate and enact accommodations, ignoring that their disabilities can affect both their ability to learn and access accommodations. When students cannot use the accommodations they are entitled to, the equity those accommodations are meant to provide is lost.

We need to account for the ways a student’s disability can create barriers not just in the classroom but in accessing accommodations. Fixing this will require changes to policies and procedures established by disability resource centres so students can actually use the support they are entitled to. Only then can students with disabilities focus on what matters most: learning.

Riley Pizza is postdoctoral researcher and Sara Brownell is President’s professor in the School of Life Sciences, both at Arizona State University.

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