When Jessica Machado assumed the role of executive director of the Goldman Center for Student Accessibility last year, something stood out to her about Tulane University: the number of students with academic accommodations.  

“Compared to the universities that I’ve worked at, and just having worked in this field for a long time, that percentage [of enrolled Tulane students] is very high,” she said.  

That number was roughly 3,000 in the last academic year, comprising about one-third of the school’s undergraduate student population and 12% of graduate students. Since 2020, the number has doubled, with “exponential” increases each year, according to Machado. The number of Goldman Center personnel is beginning to grow in parallel.  

Students may need academic accommodations, such as extra time, peer note takers or separate testing rooms to meet the needs of a physical or mental health condition. For example, a student with ADHD may qualify to take their tests in the private rooms of the Goldman Center, since their condition makes it harder to focus in a busy space.  

Though the Goldman Center oversees all aspects of accessibility at Tulane, it has become nearly synonymous with extended-time testing. That reputation is not unfounded: Extended time on exams is “by far the number one requested accommodation,” according to Machado. Other common accommodations include separate testing environments and access to laptops or specialized software for notetaking. 

Nationally, the number of students with academic accommodations seems to scale with the school’s prestige. At Ivy League institutions like Brown University and Harvard University, over 20% of undergraduates receive accommodations. At Amherst College, the figure is 34% and at Stanford University, it is 38%.  

By comparison, only 3% of students at public community colleges receive accommodations, despite students with learning disabilities being substantially more likely to enroll there. 

This suggests that the ability to get accommodations itself varies in accessibility. Formal psychological evaluations can cost thousands of dollars. Accordingly, while the Goldman Center requires students to submit official documentation of a disability before granting accommodations, they aim to be maximally flexible within their documentation standards. The center’s staff meets with students individually to hear their descriptions of impairments, after they complete extensive documentation and testing. 

“We’re not one to also debate if somebody says that there’s a significant life impact, and there’s that evidence to show that that student is [disabled], we believe them,” Machado said.  

Why accommodations are rising 

The landscape of college campuses was dramatically different for students with disabilities 30 years ago.  

Although U.S. Congress passed groundbreaking disability rights legislation 20 years earlier, a comprehensive legal framework that forced regulations to be implemented was missing. That framework arrived with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which required colleges and universities to provide reasonable accommodations to students with physical or mental impairments that substantially limit major life activities.  

Congress further expanded the ADA’s scope in 2008 by broadening the definition of disability to impairments affecting activities such as learning, concentrating, thinking and communicating. Soon after, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses lowered the diagnostic threshold for ADHD and other conditions.  

Today, about two-thirds of students with disabilities report a mental or behavioral health condition, the most common of which is ADHD. The consistently rising rates of these diagnoses partially explain the surge in academic accommodations, and some disability advocates suggest that improved access to screening in primary and secondary education may also contribute. The numbers also show, however, that just as many students receiving accommodations at the university level only seek assessment after they have enrolled.  

As a result, the role of offices like the Goldman Center now includes both ensuring the implementation of mandated accommodations and evaluating a student population with increasingly varying academic needs.  

Supporters, skeptics  

Despite the prevalence of extended time and other testing accommodations among Tulane students —  or perhaps because of them — they are the most contentious resource the Goldman Center offers.  

Rising disability rates on college campuses is sometimes framed as a rise in students from affluent families using their advantage to cheat or manipulate the system. Machado, the Goldman Center director, said that she has been met with more resistance to accommodation implementation with Tulane faculty than anywhere else. 

Machado does not take the surge in accommodations requests as a cause for alarm, though. On the contrary, she believes they are a sign the system is working.  

“I don’t think that we’re [Goldman Center] the problem. I think it’s the whole institution that’s the problem. I think it’s society and how we’ve built this way of learning and teaching and assessing students,” she said. “The real concern for me is the increasing external concern and questioning about the legitimacy of disability accommodations, rather than designing assessments … that are inclusive for all learners.” 

Students registered with the Goldman Center emphasized that their accommodations are essential to their academic success.  

Sophomore Kelsey Weddington, a finance major and student athlete, received her first accommodations last year after finding herself struggling to finish calculus exams on time. “I struggled my first semester without it,” Weddington said.  

On the question of abuse: “If anything, I feel like it’d be harder to cheat there than in a classroom where there is [just] one professor,” she said, citing the intensive screening process and video monitoring during tests. 

Another student, junior Eleanor Vande Vusse, was diagnosed with ADHD and an auditory processing disorder when she was 8 years old and has received academic accommodations, including extended time and a separate testing environment, ever since.  

“I’m sure there are people who may manipulate the system a bit because it will benefit them,” Vande Vusse said. “But also, I think [that reputation] can be pretty harmful, because someone like me, who’s had accommodation since they were in third grade, really do need access to this. I would not be able to take my exams in a normal classroom and do well.” 

Empirical studies tend to support the claim that extended time improves the performance of students with learning differences, while results on whether they improve the performance of students not eligible for accommodations are mixed. In other words, it remains unclear whether the common intuition that more time equates to an advantage is actually supported. Results on the efficacy of other common accommodations, such as separate testing environments, have been similarly mixed.  

An expert in psychological evaluation affiliated with Tulane, who wished to remain anonymous, said that while students with accommodations tend to be strong self-advocates, they can overstate the evidence supporting their specific requests.  

“I do find at Tulane there’s an interesting way people talk about their accommodations, like, I need, for example, ‘I need one and a half’ versus ‘two times’ [extra]” she said. “For the testing I do and for my knowledge base, it’s splitting hairs … There’s nothing that says incrementally you need 2 versus you need 1.5 [times extra].” 

The future of Goldman 

Questions about the role and reach of accommodations become even more urgent when looking ahead.  At the current rate of growth, Tulane could see the majority of its student body receiving an accommodation in the next few years.  

Machado admitted that seeing a majority of students get accommodations would be cause for concern. She also suggested, paradoxically, that the future of the Goldman Center, may actually be its disappearance. 

This view, based on Universal Design for Learning, appears increasingly commonly adopted among Tulane faculty. UDL is a framework that hopes to accommodate all students by providing multiple means of engagement, representation and expression for course materials. Already, the Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching leads a workshop on how to implement UDL in classrooms each summer, according to Toni Weiss, CELT’s executive director of classroom engagement.  

“What we’re here for is to help students learn and to prepare them for the world out there,” Weiss said. “I don’t see how getting the proper accommodations is going to impact their ability to compete in the world.” 

In Machado’s words: “The goal, in my mind, would be to eliminate the need for an accommodation at all.” 

…  

Marcella Batlle Cestero contributed to the reporting of this story. 

Editor’s note: A previously published version of this story stated that the Goldman Center does not require official medical documentation for enrollment, whereas in fact medical documentation is required, but the Goldman Center is flexible with which forms of documentation are acceptable.