That reality is showing up on a campus. A growing share of college students are seeking medical evaluations for ADHD, anxiety, and depression—and requesting academic accommodations such as extended time on exams and papers. At some of the country’s selective universities, the numbers are striking: more than 20% of undergraduates at Brown and Harvard are registered as disabled. At UMass Amherst, it’s 34%; Stanford, 38%, according to data analyzed by The Atlantic.
While it’s clear that many students requesting accommodations do so for legitimate medical reasons and that increased diagnoses may reflect greater mental-health awareness, some experts have raised concerns about overdiagnosis and whether universities are making it too easy for students to qualify. And the debate has set off a wildfire on social media this week, catching the attention of high-profile business leaders, including Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder.
Lonsdale’s response offered no sympathy. “Loser generation,” he wrote in reaction to a graph showing the rising number of undergraduate students reporting disabilities.
“At Stanford it’s a hack for housing though and at some point I get it, even if it’s not my personal ethics. Terrible leadership from the university.”
He argued that families have been slowly using disability accommodations to give their children an academic advantage—when they might not actually need it.
“Claiming your child has a disability to give them a leg up became an obvious dominant game theoretic strategy for parents without honor in the 2010’s,” Lonsdale wrote earlier this month on X. “Great signal to avoid a family / not do business with parents who act this way.”
And while it’s unclear how many students, if any, are trying to game the system, Lonsdale has made his broader view clear: he doesn’t think universities are preparing young people—or evaluating them—in ways that matter.
“No great companies are interested in the BS games played by universities,” he added.
Fortune reached out to Lonsdale for further comment.
Lonsdale’s complicated history with higher education
Though a Stanford alum himself, Lonsdale has a complicated history with the institution and higher education more broadly.
In the early 2010s, while serving as a mentor in a Stanford tech entrepreneurship course, Lonsdale was accused of sexual assault by a student—and banned from mentoring undergraduates for 10 years and from campus entirely. The assault charges were later dropped, but Lonsdale acknowledged violating a rule prohibiting consensual relationships between mentors and students.
Less than a decade later, in 2021, Lonsdale cofounded his own school—the University of Austin—with Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, and others. The institution prides itself on freedom of speech and overcoming the “mediocrity” of traditional higher education. It welcomed its first group of undergraduates last fall and remains unaccredited.
The school has drawn support from Lonsdale’s fellow Palantir cofounder and Stanford alum Alex Karp, who has also criticized the college system.
“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp, Palantir’s CEO, told CNBC earlier this year.
Instead, the 58-year-old said Palantir is building a new credential “separate from class or background,” that is the “best credential in tech.”
“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian,” Karp said during an earnings call earlier this year. “No one cares about the other stuff.”
Preston Fore
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