The percentage of students claiming to have disabilities — and thus qualifying for accommodations such as extra time for assignments and tests — is higher than the percentage of male students at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
As reported by The New York Post, more than one-third of students enrolled in the law school — 37% — are also in UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students Program. By comparison, male students make up approximately 30-33% of enrollees. The most common disabilities listed were emotional and psychological — primarily attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, but occasionally depression as well. According to data from the Disabled Students Program office, 98% of the disabilities claimed by law students fell into those categories.
The change is staggering: in 2021, just 3% of UC Berkeley law school graduates were part of the Disabled Students Program. Among undergraduates, the number was slightly higher at 10%.
The dramatic swing has some critics wondering whether some of the claims are less about real disabilities and more about the fact that enrollment in the program allows students to have 150% or even 200% of the time allotted to students outside the program for the grueling legal exams they must pass in order to graduate.
Campus exam proctoring services have reported a dramatic increase in requests for accommodations that reflects the jump as well, more than tripling from under 4,000 in the 2021-2022 academic year to over 14,000 in 2024-2025.
Andrew Testerman, a graduate who dug into the program’s use and laid out his findings in a report for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, commented, “We are asked to believe that students at elite law schools are significantly more likely to be disabled than our nation’s senior citizens.”
But the statistical anomalies did not stop there.
“At U.C. Berkeley, proportionally more women than men seek accommodations for ADHD — even though in the population at large, men are several times more likely to have this disorder,” Testerman wrote. “Thus, either many students are falsely claiming to be disabled, or the number of disabled students is truly staggering — to the point where disability status would in fact be the norm, and the exception would swallow the rule.”
Testerman also proposed a solution to the problem, arguing that President Donald Trump’s administration could easily take action: “President Trump could go a long way toward solving this problem. A single executive order, together with revised administrative guidance and a notice of proposed rulemaking, could change the incentive structure.”
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