Posted on 12/03/2025 4:26:37 AM PST by DFG
Earlier this week, in ‘Easy A’s for Ivy League Idiots’ I wrote about the massive level of grade inflation in the Ivy League.
In 2005, a quarter of Harvard students received A’s. In 2025, it’s over 60%. At Yale, A’s went from 67% of grades in 2010 to 78% of grades in 2023. The prestigious university has had awkward moments like before, such as when 91% of students graduated with honors in 2001, and these days it tries to keep the number of honors graduates in the 50s. But much like shopping in a supermarket, it’s hard to avoid the inevitable recognition of inflation when looking at the 3.8 GPA that’s the floor for most Harvard seniors.
At Yale, the average GPA is 3.7 and a cutoff was implemented to keep the number of honors graduates at 30%. Anything else would make Yale seem as ridiculous as Harvard.
Grade inflation is one part of the scam, but another is defining disability down to such an extent that everyone is disabled.
Not quite everyone. Just 1 in 5 at Harvard.
At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.
A “disability” that magically lowers their standards.
The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.
When a disability is defined as being ‘sad’ or ‘anxious’, well then everyone is disabled.
One recent Stanford graduate told me that when she got mononucleosis as a freshman, she turned to the disability office: Because she couldn’t exercise, she was struggling to focus in class. Though she’d always been fidgety, she’d never had academic issues in high school—but high school had been easier than Stanford. The office suggested that she might have ADHD, and encouraged her to seek a diagnosis. A psychiatrist and her pediatrician diagnosed her with ADHD and dyslexia, and Stanford granted her extra time on tests, among other accommodations.
Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability.
Disability has become the emotional support animal of accommodation. It’s a scam that has gotten out of control and is further devaluing what’s left of the credibility of a college degree.
Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations.
What are they going to do when they have to get actual jobs? Oh that’s easy, they’ll demand ‘mental health days’.
Woke up feeling exhausted, irritable, and overwhelmed? Not ill, exactly, but not quite well, either?
A cough, fever, or nausea are clear signs you should think about taking a sick day. But it’s not always as obvious when your psychological load is pointing toward a similar remedy — a mental health day.
Shrugging off all responsibilities, even for just 24 hours, can help you return to work and life with a fresher perspective and leave you feeling calmer, more capable, and perhaps even more productive, says clinical psychologist Natalie Dattilo, an instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.
The only thing they’ve really been trained to do is to pull a Tonya Harding and whine. And since the system rewards this behavior, why not make your imaginary disability into your identity.
Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told me that the fastest-growing group of students who come to him seems to be those who have done their own research and believe that a disability is the source of their academic or emotional challenges. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” Lindstrom said. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
Lindstrom worries that the system encourages students to see themselves as less capable than they actually are. By attributing all of their difficulties to a disability, they are pathologizing normal challenges. “When it comes to a disorder like ADHD, we all have those symptoms sometimes,” Lindstrom told me. “But most of us aren’t impaired by them.”
Much like transgenderism, playing the victim can be profitable. So why not do it? 20% of Harvard does. Those are our leaders of tomorrow.
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I’m sure they are. The libs took the boosters at warp speed to slow the spread for 15 days( about 5 years)
Social ontology is the ultimate disability.
So, what’s new? Just go to Walmart and look at handicapped parking and the mess it is in. Fat or old gets you a spot and WMT will not allow local LE to issue citations in the parking lots. So, Harvard may as well join mom and pop...
If they are democrats it isn’t surprising.
Given the meme / truth that "liberalism is a mental disorder," that number seems a low estimate....
My father was on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. I can’t see me telling him I was “Overwhelmed and anxious”
Mentally disabled.
Getting a proper diagnosis of a learning disability is very expensive and time consuming followed by decades of specialist tutors and at home scaffolding. I doubt these students have true learning disabilities. There are learning differences not all are disabilities.
I believe anyone who graduates from harvard is disabled because they attended harvard. What a stain on one’s self.
“””” 91% of students graduated with honors in 2001,””””
This reminds me of when I attended my niece’s high school graduation in Colorado in 2009.
There were 200 students in her graduating class and 120 of those students graduated with honors.
Since the DEI degree and department is such a failure, colleges will just swap in fake disability preferences.they rename everything this is the Walz plan.
Mentally disabled.
++++++++++=
Thanks for posting what I’m thinking
To my view, many decades of "English" classes and then expanding into "liberal arts" classes, anything that serves to topple liberty in favor of socialism / Communism has been shoehorned into curricula. As the observation by many states, "diversity" does not allow diversity of political opinion.
Continuing to rename the failures will not serve long term, but it surely seems the academic Left has no long term goal in mind, nut rather "revolution now."
It is such an ultimately skeptical view, because the Leftists pulling this stunt all want for themselves fancy salaries for "words" while holding the blue-collar world which actually does real labor in contempt.
They need to do like that dude in Spinal Tap. Move the highest GPA up to 11.0, and only honor grads can get 11. Then the rest can get 4.0 and above.
"The end continues..."
Yeah, and Surveys indicate that around 20–25% of Yale’s undergraduate student population identify as LGBTQ+.
One is tempted to ask — is this explosion of LGBTQ students a result of changing genetics ( born that way ), or societal pressure?
Or has it always been this number since the university’s inception, only hidden then, but now coming out of the closet?
They weren’t disabled before Harvard.
Did Harvard disable them, or
Did Harvard’s education reveal to them that they were disabled.
>Note - Remember this when interviewing Harvard grads.
yeah my dad almost got his leg blown off in Korea by a sniper. “Dad, I’m a little depressed today.”. ha
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