I agree the US is trending towards third-world mentalities. Statistics aren't good. >50% of Americans now see homeownership as out of reach. Studies keep cropping up stating at 30-40% of young Americans will never marry. Never mind that many people need to pass 5-10 rounds of interviews to get a junior level role.
This all seems to stem from one demographics greed or another. Our parents generation and suppressing housing builds. The corporations using monopolies of dating applications which at this point seem to be suppressing relationship formulation more than increasing it. The political classes using tariffs for unclear purposes to shrink our economy.
Having registered disability is not the same as getting generous accommodations. The article has no data on accommodations themselves. At best, it has a few anecdotes about rooms allocations.
I am totally fine with people avoiding expensive or bad meal plan. The fact that you have to pay for an expensive or bad meal plan should be the scandal, not the fact that students avoid it.
And I am even fine with accommodation from class participation. Too much of it is activity for points only which wastes everybody's time.
> The gaming doesn’t stop at disability. Stanford requires undergrads to purchase an $7,944 annual meal plan—unless they claim a religious dietary restriction the cafeteria can’t accommodate.
Isn’t the mandatory meal plan also a game by the university? A really frustrating trend I’ve seen more companies do nowadays is to tack on mandatory charges for crap that I don’t need or want, and it’s happening everywhere.
If declaring a disability is what it takes to get out of a compulsory meal charge, then it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
It’s not just students or consumers playing a game, companies (or universities in this case) are playing one too, and it’s called: how to get as much money out of our customers as possible.
That’s because it’s smart business when you abuse your captive customer base, totally different thing. When pesky customers do the same back to you, well, time to complain about the ‘third worldification of American institutions,’ or something.
In Tan's partial defense, I don't think he would be complaining about "third worldification of American institutions" just over evasion of meal-plan rent-seeking. The original, much higher-profile story was about the failure modes of using the disability accommodations process to allocate broadly desirable things that are rivalrous or positional (as opposed to narrowly-scoped accommodations), and then Tan tacked on a tangent about the meal-plan thing because it has surface similarities and also doesn't make the students look great, without considering whether it's really an instance of the same core issue.
Yeah, my step-daughter is a vegetarian. She cannot opt out of the several thousand dollar a year meal plan at her college despite the campus dining facilities having often only one not-particularly-good vegetarian option (I'm not vegetarian but when visiting I've tried the options).
So we're left with paying her credit card to buy groceries and a largely unused meal plan.
> it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
Well, that's often because Aramark and Chartwells (Compass) require that in their contracts. My partner is the Accounting Manager for another university in our state and that's mandated in their contract (along with other clauses like "any event on campus must be offered to us for catering first, and we will either cater it or decline, and only then can you use another caterer").
There can be debates on why that is allowed in the negotiation, though.
To be clear, the evidence here is that one student tweeted and that many more Stanford students have a registered disability (which doesn't not even mean that they are receiving accommodations) than students at community colleges.
For me to buy this moral panic I need to see more compelling evidence. Can we see the students that clearly are getting undeserved accommodations? That is the actual thing people are worried about. But zero of the articles whinging about this can point to data here.
Could it be, I dunno, that rich students are vastly more likely to have access to the medical system that can identify and document various things like ADHD?
Theres a theory... and Im not saying I agree or disagree ... that white people, either genetically or culturally, have an inherent natural social conscience which creates high trust societies which is reflected in countries and neighborhoods that they create. Its just something they do naturally like a labrador likes to swim.
So according to the theory there will be an inverse correlation between high trust society and the presence of white people.
I dont know of its true or not, but, world wide, all people want to live in predominantly white founded neighborhoods and countries and never the inverse.
Not to take away from the benefits of other races but naturally creating high trust societies could potentially be one value that white people add to the world.
As this great social experiment of America continues we will see how powerful the influence of race/culture plays on high trust institutions.
You have found three outliers out of 193 countries.
It still really doesn't disprove the theory that 100% of white western civilization founded countries have people trying to immigrate to them whereas outside of a tiny handful the rest of the countries have zero immigration problems.
All of these countries need to be studied for what behaviors and cultures create high trust first world style societies.
White American leadership is right now acting so massively dishonestly, that the premise does not hold. White dominated institutions dont tend to behave more morally, they just tend to be more racist against non whites. And far right is super duper dishonest.
I agree the US is trending towards third-world mentalities. Statistics aren't good. >50% of Americans now see homeownership as out of reach. Studies keep cropping up stating at 30-40% of young Americans will never marry. Never mind that many people need to pass 5-10 rounds of interviews to get a junior level role.
This all seems to stem from one demographics greed or another. Our parents generation and suppressing housing builds. The corporations using monopolies of dating applications which at this point seem to be suppressing relationship formulation more than increasing it. The political classes using tariffs for unclear purposes to shrink our economy.
https://www.equimundo.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/State-o...
Having registered disability is not the same as getting generous accommodations. The article has no data on accommodations themselves. At best, it has a few anecdotes about rooms allocations.
I am totally fine with people avoiding expensive or bad meal plan. The fact that you have to pay for an expensive or bad meal plan should be the scandal, not the fact that students avoid it.
And I am even fine with accommodation from class participation. Too much of it is activity for points only which wastes everybody's time.
> The gaming doesn’t stop at disability. Stanford requires undergrads to purchase an $7,944 annual meal plan—unless they claim a religious dietary restriction the cafeteria can’t accommodate.
Isn’t the mandatory meal plan also a game by the university? A really frustrating trend I’ve seen more companies do nowadays is to tack on mandatory charges for crap that I don’t need or want, and it’s happening everywhere.
If declaring a disability is what it takes to get out of a compulsory meal charge, then it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
It’s not just students or consumers playing a game, companies (or universities in this case) are playing one too, and it’s called: how to get as much money out of our customers as possible.
That’s because it’s smart business when you abuse your captive customer base, totally different thing. When pesky customers do the same back to you, well, time to complain about the ‘third worldification of American institutions,’ or something.
In Tan's partial defense, I don't think he would be complaining about "third worldification of American institutions" just over evasion of meal-plan rent-seeking. The original, much higher-profile story was about the failure modes of using the disability accommodations process to allocate broadly desirable things that are rivalrous or positional (as opposed to narrowly-scoped accommodations), and then Tan tacked on a tangent about the meal-plan thing because it has surface similarities and also doesn't make the students look great, without considering whether it's really an instance of the same core issue.
Yeah, my step-daughter is a vegetarian. She cannot opt out of the several thousand dollar a year meal plan at her college despite the campus dining facilities having often only one not-particularly-good vegetarian option (I'm not vegetarian but when visiting I've tried the options).
So we're left with paying her credit card to buy groceries and a largely unused meal plan.
> it’s worth examining why the school feels compelled to make the meal plan mandatory in the first place.
Well, that's often because Aramark and Chartwells (Compass) require that in their contracts. My partner is the Accounting Manager for another university in our state and that's mandated in their contract (along with other clauses like "any event on campus must be offered to us for catering first, and we will either cater it or decline, and only then can you use another caterer").
There can be debates on why that is allowed in the negotiation, though.
Related:
Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715
Accomodation Nation
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...
To be clear, the evidence here is that one student tweeted and that many more Stanford students have a registered disability (which doesn't not even mean that they are receiving accommodations) than students at community colleges.
For me to buy this moral panic I need to see more compelling evidence. Can we see the students that clearly are getting undeserved accommodations? That is the actual thing people are worried about. But zero of the articles whinging about this can point to data here.
Could it be, I dunno, that rich students are vastly more likely to have access to the medical system that can identify and document various things like ADHD?
> This isn’t immigration-mediated
Theres a theory... and Im not saying I agree or disagree ... that white people, either genetically or culturally, have an inherent natural social conscience which creates high trust societies which is reflected in countries and neighborhoods that they create. Its just something they do naturally like a labrador likes to swim.
So according to the theory there will be an inverse correlation between high trust society and the presence of white people.
I dont know of its true or not, but, world wide, all people want to live in predominantly white founded neighborhoods and countries and never the inverse.
Not to take away from the benefits of other races but naturally creating high trust societies could potentially be one value that white people add to the world.
As this great social experiment of America continues we will see how powerful the influence of race/culture plays on high trust institutions.
https://stanfordreview.org/content/images/size/w1200/2024/02...
> So according to the theory there will be an inverse correlation between high trust society and the presence of white people.
How do you explain Singapore? South Korea? Japan?
These are good questions.
You have found three outliers out of 193 countries.
It still really doesn't disprove the theory that 100% of white western civilization founded countries have people trying to immigrate to them whereas outside of a tiny handful the rest of the countries have zero immigration problems.
All of these countries need to be studied for what behaviors and cultures create high trust first world style societies.
White American leadership is right now acting so massively dishonestly, that the premise does not hold. White dominated institutions dont tend to behave more morally, they just tend to be more racist against non whites. And far right is super duper dishonest.