The Forest and the Tree: What the Latest Accommodation Debate Gets Wrong

A lot has been written this week about the increase in student accommodations on college campuses. It started with a lengthy examination of the system in The Atlantic. Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro followed with critical commentary from the center-left and Fortune from the center-right.

I agree with much of this critique—there are genuine abuses by students and parents, administrations are overcautious about legal liability, and there’s a real question about whether we should accommodate a student’s test anxiety when part of what’s being tested is performance under stress.

My problem with these pieces isn’t the critiques themselves. It’s that they’re not coming from a place of lived experience with today’s students.

These commentators—many of them my age or a little younger—are basing their analysis partly on data. But the emotional register of their arguments is clearly formed by their own college experiences. What they don’t seem to realize is how profoundly different the college experience is today in nearly all its aspects.

College instructors see it everyday. From the moment students engage the college application process through to graduation and the job search, most of what happens in college would seem foreign to someone who left campus in 2005 and hasn’t spent much time there since. A good friend’s wife is a college counselor at a top prep school, and the first thing she tells parents is to forget everything they think they know about getting into college. The SATs are different. The applications are different. The competition from abroad is different. The number of schools you should apply to is different. And on and on.

But it’s not just the application process. College itself is different. The competition to get into the right courses and to secure the best internships is intense in ways that would shock a student from the 1990s. Rather than bars and frat parties, social life for most of my students largely consists of resume-building activities. The pressure to graduate with the smallest possible loan balance is beyond anything those of us who graduated before 2008 might recall—because the loans are bigger than any loans we might have had.
And the role of parents in their children’s higher education can be remarkably intense. The idea that once you’re in college you’re “on your own” is long gone. Parents are involved in all aspects of their students’ academic lives, from course selection to grading disputes to internship choices to the job market. Considering what they’re paying, maybe that’s to be expected. But the family pressure today’s college students face is very different from what my generation experienced. And that’s to say nothing of the ways the education system failed them during COVID, particularly during their formative high school years.

Is there something to the “kids these days are soft” critique? Sure. In some ways they are. But in other ways they’re much harder than we were ever forced to be. They’re navigating a college experience that’s more competitive, more expensive, and more precarious than ours was, with less of the freedom and space for error that we took for granted.

So although I have my issues with the way the accommodations regime is implemented at my university and others across the country, to focus on it without reference to all these other changes is to single out one tree in a forest of transformation. The accommodation system didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It emerged as part of a broader shift in what college is, who it serves, and what it demands of students.

If we want to fix what’s broken in the accommodation system—and there are things that need fixing—we need to understand it as part of this larger context. Otherwise we’re just yelling at a symptom while ignoring the disease.