OPINION: I walked out of class. Universities need to better accommodate students struggling with mental health.

Photo by Columbia University

By Kat Sewon Oh (MIA ’23)

In October 2021, I attended my Conceptual Foundations of International Politics lecture, a core course for all students pursuing a Master of International Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). The lecture was two hours of our guest speaker rambling in a monotone without any visual aid. 

So I stood up and left the lecture hall. This class failed to consider how to effectively reach and engage a disabled student like me. 

Universities claim to educate students for success, but they fall short of helping students with disabilities reach their full potential. 

I have three mental disabilities: bipolar disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and auditory processing disorder. All three severely limit my daily life functions and my ability to work. Not only am I unable to focus in class or process words, sometimes I can’t make it to class because I spiral from a week of mania into more weeks of depression. 

I receive accommodations through SIPA’s Office of Disability Services. Until I received a professional diagnosis after four years of searching for mental health specialists, before starting at Columbia, I was one of many college students suffering from unknown mental health conditions who couldn’t access official disability accommodations. This problem is endemic not just to Columbia, but also to the Ivy League and other elite institutions.

Through disability services, I receive note-taking services, permission to use my laptop in class or audio-record lectures, short deadline extensions for assignments, and excused absences. These services sound great in theory, but are not effective in practice. 

The office provides guidelines to faculty to make classes more accessible, such as teaching with multiple visual, auditory, or interactive methods or providing PowerPoint presentations at least 24 hours in advance. These guidelines are only suggestions, however, and faculty face no consequences for ignoring them. 

If a professor doesn’t allow laptops, it’s on me to ask for an exception, and I stick out like a sore thumb among other students handwriting their notes. 

If a professor decides to format their lecture as a lengthy monologue with no PowerPoint, there’s ultimately nothing the Office of Disability Services can do, which is why I left my Conceptual Foundations class. 

I bring up my personal experience to point to a broader issue: mental illness for adolescents and young adults is rising nationwide. 

The American Psychological Association reported that more young adults experienced severe psychological distress in the late 2010s versus the mid-2000s. Mental Health America found that in 2019, nearly 50 million American adults experienced a mental illness. This number has only gone up since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

These statistics are just a few examples alongside the recent flood of news stressing the need for mental health support for young adults. If we can’t address mental health care as a whole, we can start tackling a specific problem: the American higher education system’s lack of effective disability services. 

Universities need to provide the right accommodations to students. I understand that every disability is unique, and it is difficult to figure out what the right accommodations are for everybody. But here are three steps for starting that conversation. 

First, actually help the students who say, “I need help.” Mental Health America found that students requesting disability accommodations often “faced staff that were not knowledgeable about psychiatric disabilities, staff with discriminatory beliefs, … an unclear or burdensome documentation process, and … negative responses or outright refusal of requested accommodations from professors.” 

I experienced this as an undergraduate at Yale, when I went to my dean for an extension. She replied, “It’s just stress. You’ll be fine.” Being turned down by the system that’s supposed to help you is incredibly invalidating and embarrassing. It’s easy to blame yourself for being broken, when really the failure lies within a broken system.

Second, allow more students without clinical diagnoses to receive accommodations. Many students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — face systemic barriers to mental health care access, including high costs, insufficient insurance coverage, lack of awareness, and social stigma. They don’t need yet another barrier from their school to access the help they desperately need. 

Third, give students agency to choose what accommodations they need. I don’t need a paid note-taker; I need the professor to email or print handouts if they plan to do two-hour monologues. 

Some administrations would push back that this is an expensive plan. Research by the Job Accommodation Network shows, however, that reasonable accommodations are actually inexpensive, with more than 3,000 surveyed employers reporting that 56% of workplace accommodations cost nothing to implement, and other accommodations had a one-time cost of $500. With the number of students needing disability accommodations still in the minority of the entire school population, it should be more than feasible for Columbia to execute. 

Skeptics may worry that students will take advantage of the system. Trust me on this one, people who want to lie will do so even with rigorous vetting.

Just look at the Varsity Blues scandal, where dozens of wealthy Americans paid large sums to get their children into elite universities, using fraudulent test scores and bribes for officials. Someone who attempts to “cheat” through an educational program that’s more accessible for students with disabilities would, at most, receive extended time on tests and printed handouts, not an entire college education they didn’t complete themselves. 

I’ll bet that most students with disabilities not only earned their education and degrees, but they worked even harder than many non-disabled students to reach their goals. 

By making disability accommodations more accessible, faculty and administrators might finally see how many university students are disadvantaged by the current system. In an ideal world, these initiatives can be applied in the wider K-12 education system, much earlier on. 

Hopefully, by making these changes, no other student will walk out of class in frustration like I did, because they feel there’s no way for them to learn. 

Kat Sewon Oh (MIA ’23) is studying Human Rights and Humanitarian Policy with specializations in East Asia and Technology, Media, and Communications.