Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them | Elsa Johnson, The Times In 2023, one month into my freshman year at Stanford University, an upperclassman was showing me her dorm room — a prized single in one of the nicest buildings on campus. As she took me around her space, which included a private bathroom, a walk-in shower and a great view of Hoover Tower, she casually mentioned that she had lived in a single all four years she had attended Stanford. I was surprised. Most people don’t get the privilege of a single room until they reach their senior year. That’s when my friend gave me a tip: Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation”. She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”. Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask. A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions. But the most common disability accommodation students ask for — and receive — is the best housing on campus. At Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where competition for the best dorm rooms is fierce, this practice is particularly rife. The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter. At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success. The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. That’s why I decided to claim my legitimate illness — endometriosis — as a disability at Stanford. When I arrived on campus two and a half years ago, I would have assumed that special allowances were made for a small number of students who genuinely needed them. But I quickly discovered that wasn’t true. Some diagnoses are real and serious, of course, such as epilepsy, anaphylactic allergies, sleep apnea or severe physical disabilities. But most students, in my experience, claim less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety. And some “disabilities” are just downright silly. Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant. That’s why I felt justified in claiming endometriosis as a disability. It is a painful condition in which cells from the uterus grow outside the womb. I’m often doubled over in agony from the problem, for which there is no known cure, so I decided to ask for a single room in a campus dorm where I could endure those moments in private. The application process was very easy. I registered my condition on the Stanford Office of Accessible Education website and made an appointment to meet an adviser later that week. The system is staffed largely by empathetic women who want to help students. As I explained my diagnosis and symptoms over Zoom to one woman, she listened, nodded sympathetically, related my problems to her own life and asked a few basic questions. Within 30 minutes, I was registered as a student with a disability, entitled to more accommodations than I asked for. In addition to a single housing assignment, I was granted extra absences from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of my classes. I was met with so little scepticism or questioning, I probably didn’t even need a doctor’s note to get these exemptions. Had I been pushier, I am sure I could have received almost any accommodation I asked for. While I feel entitled to my single room, I would feel guilty about some of the perks I have — except that so many of my fellow students have gamed the system. Take Callie, a recent Stanford grad with ADHD and Asperger’s who agreed to be quoted under a pseudonym. Callie was diagnosed with her conditions in elementary school; in return, Stanford granted her a single room for all four years, plus extra time on tests — and a few more perks. “In college, I haven’t had that many ‘in real life’ tests as opposed to take-home essays,” Callie told me. “When I did use the extra time, I felt guilty, because I probably didn’t deserve the accommodations, given the fact I got into Stanford and could compete at a high academic level. Extra time on tests — some students even get double time — seems unfair to me.” But at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough. Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground”. The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate. And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”. Administrators seem powerless to reform the system and frankly don’t seem to care. How do you prove someone doesn’t have anxiety? How do you verify they don’t need extra time on a test? How do you challenge a religious dietary claim without risking a discrimination lawsuit? I often think back to that conversation with my upperclassman friend. She wasn’t proud of gaming the system and she wasn’t ashamed either. She was simply rational. The university had created a set of incentives and she had simply responded to them. That’s what strikes me most about the accommodation explosion at Stanford and similar schools. The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them? Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice. When accommodations mean the difference between a cramped triple and your own room, when extra test time can boost your grade point average, opting out feels like self-sabotage. Who would make their lives harder when the easiest option is just a 30-minute Zoom call away?

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AI is already writing almost one-third of new software code, study shows | Complexity Science Hub Generative AI is reshaping software development—and fast. A new study published in Science shows that AI-assisted coding is spreading rapidly, though unevenly: in the U.S., the share of new code relying on AI rose from 5% in 2022 to 29% in early 2025, compared with just 12% in China. AI usage is highest among less experienced programmers, but productivity gains go to seasoned developers. The software industry is enormous. In the U.S. economy alone, firms spend an estimated $600 billion a year in wages on coding-related work. Every day, billions of lines of code keep the global economy running. How is AI changing this backbone of modern life? A research team led by the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) found that by the end of 2024, around one-third of all newly written software functions—self-contained subroutines in a computer program—in the United States were already being created with the support of AI systems. "We analyzed more than 30 million Python contributions from roughly 160,000 developers on GitHub, the world's largest collaborative programming platform," says Simone Daniotti of CSH and Utrecht University. GitHub records every step of coding—additions, edits, improvements—allowing researchers to track programming work across the globe in real time. Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. Regional gaps are large The team used a specially trained AI model to identify whether blocks of code were AI-generated, for instance via ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot. "The results show extremely rapid diffusion," explains Frank Neffke, who leads the Transforming Economies group at CSH. "In the U.S., AI-assisted coding jumped from around 5% in 2022 to nearly 30% in the last quarter of 2024." At the same time, the study found wide differences across countries. "While the share of AI-supported code is highest in the U.S. at 29%, Germany reaches 23% and France 24%, followed by India at 20%, which has been catching up fast," he says, while Russia (15%) and China (12%) still lagged behind at the end of the study. "It's no surprise the U.S. leads—that's where the leading LLMs come from. Users in China and Russia have faced barriers to accessing these models, blocked by their own governments or by the providers themselves, though VPN workarounds exist. Recent domestic Chinese breakthroughs like DeepSeek, released after our data ends in early 2025, suggest this gap may close quickly," says Johannes Wachs, a faculty member at CSH and associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest. Experienced developers benefit most The study shows that the use of generative AI increased programmers' productivity by 3.6% by the end of 2024. "That may sound modest, but at the scale of the global software industry it represents a sizable gain," says Neffke, who is also a professor at Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U). The study finds no differences in AI usage between women and men. By contrast, experience levels matter: less experienced programmers use generative AI in 37% of their code, compared to just 27% for experienced programmers. Despite this, the productivity gains the study documents are driven exclusively by experienced users. "Beginners hardly benefit at all," says Daniotti. Generative AI therefore does not automatically level the playing field; it can widen existing gaps. In addition, experienced software developers experiment more with new libraries and unusual combinations of existing software tools. "This suggests that AI does not only accelerate routine tasks, but also speeds up learning, helping experienced programmers widen their capabilities and more easily venture into new domains of software development," says Wachs. Economic gains What does all of this mean for the economy? "The U.S. spends an estimated $637 billion to $1.06 trillion annually in wages on programming tasks, according to an analysis of about 900 different occupations," says co-author Xiangnan Feng from CSH. If 29% of code is AI-assisted and productivity rises by 3.6%, that adds between $23 and $38 billion in value each year. "This is likely a conservative estimate," Neffke points out. "The economic impact of generative AI in software development was already substantial at the end of 2024 and is likely to have increased further since our analysis." Looking ahead Software development is undergoing profound transformation. AI is becoming central to digital infrastructure, boosting productivity and fostering innovation—but mainly for people who already have substantial work experience. "For businesses, policymakers, and educational institutes, the key question is not whether AI will be used, but how to make its benefits accessible without reinforcing inequalities," says Wachs. "When even a car has essentially become a software product, we need to understand the hurdles to AI adoption—at the company, regional, and national levels—as quickly as possible," Neffke adds. Read more: