Accommodating Gen Y's ADD
October 16th, 2006
Sue Shellenbarger's most recent "Work & Family" column in the Wall Street Journal -- "Young Workers With Dyslexia, ADD Find Office Less Accommodating Than School" -- resonated with me. She notes that employers have not kept pace with the recent growth in diagnoses of learning disabilities and the accommodations Gen Y students have grown accustomed to at school.
I have mixed feelings about her call for more accommodations. I would guestimate that at least half of the Gen Y college students and recent grads I work with have been diagnosed with a learning disability, which makes me wonder whether something still counts as a disability when it seems increasingly to be the norm.
I also wonder -- and worry -- about the students who receive such generous accommodations in college (from both their schools and their parents) that they emerge from college convinced they can't handle even basic tasks. I worked with a recent college graduate a few years ago who refused, based on his disability, to assemble a list of graduate schools he was interested in and their deadlines. That's it. School, deadline. School, deadline. Repeat twelve times. I even showed him where to find the deadlines on the grad school websites. He was convinced he couldn't do it and reacted with shock and anger when I told him I wouldn't do it for him. I felt like the first person to say to him, "you must do this yourself."
Perhaps I was. I didn't need to ask him how he'd graduated from college -- a good one
-- with that (perceived) incapacity, because I knew that his parents
and school administrators had basically absolved him of having to do
anything for himself. I did, however, ask him how he would ever hold down a job if he couldn't handle a task as rudimentary as that one. All those accommodations had really set him up for failure. It was depressing. At what point are these accommodations exacerbating learning disabilities, and creating life disabiltities? Consider the accommodations that Shellenbarger recommends employers make available for this influx of learning disabled millennials:
- tape recorders to record or dictate information
- frequent short breaks
- quiet workspace
- specific filing or organizational systems
- varied presentation methods during training
The one that I find most unrealistic is the fourth -- since when is it the boss's job to keep an employee organized? Even the article, which is very pro-accommodations, quotes a Disabilities Act lawyer about employees who "have an undue sense of entitlement":
Attorney Patricia H. Latham of Washington, D.C., tells of a client with ADD who kept arriving to work late. "They're angry with me, and I don't think they should be, because that's part of my problem," the woman said and asked Ms. Latham to write her bosses a letter. Ms. Latham refused, telling the woman, "your employer doesn't have to put up with your being late to work."
There's no question in my mind that colleges and the parents of Gen Y feed that completely bonkers sense of entitlement and incapability. Could there possibly be a worse way to prepare college students for the working world?
The article also made me ponder the number of people who manage to wrangle learning disability diagnoses to secure accommodations on their standardized admissions tests. I know for a fact that some people game the system, and somewhere licensed professionals all sign off on this stuff, which makes it awfully hard to tell applicants, "that's bad -- don't do it." Interestingly, after being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the makers of the GMAT exam no longer indicate on their score reports whether the test taker has been accommodated. LSAT score reports still do, but surely some litigious applicant (or more likely the applicant's parent) is putting a stop to that as I type.
re: Accommodating Gen Y's ADD
Anna and the article bring up several valid points. The diagnosis of
learning disabilities has become all too common and accommodations in
academic settings may enable certain students to avoid the realities
of time-management and organizational discipline.
I respectfully disagree with the assertion, however, that it is easy
to "rangle learning disability diagnoses" and receive extra
accommodations on graduate school exams. As someone with a long
standing learning disability, I have had extensive dealings with
LSAC's accommodated testing services. They require a long battery of
tests that take over two days to administer. The standard for
determining whether an individual warrants accommodations is equally
as daunting. There must be a two standard deviation difference (i.e.
95%) between one's performance IQ and one verbal ability IQ. By
definition, this type difference occurs in only a small percentage of
the population. In fact according to LSAC's Research Report entitled
The Predictive Validity of Accommodated LSAT Scores, in any given year
only about 240 students received extra-time accommodations for ADD/LD.
Indeed, LSAC has done an excellent job of limiting accommodations to
learning disabled students who have a verbal ability that may not be
reflected in non-accommodated LSAT exam results.
Students with learning disabilities contribute to the classroom and
the workforce in many ways. They may devise a unique business
strategy or take note of a frequently overlooked line in a John Donne
poem. Personally, the biggest take a way from the article was that
learning disabled employees may not succeed at their jobs by simply
asking for the types of accommodations granted to them on standardized
tests or at school. Instead employees with learning disabilities
succeed when they find a position that works with their strengths:
"The best solution is to find a job where a learning disability doesn't
hurt your performance -- or even enhances it. Jaime Gomez, a Texas
customer-service worker, says he hasn't told his current supervisors
about his ADD, because "you don't know what kind of reaction you'll
get." But his position is such a good fit that it doesn't matter.
After several job changes, he found a post that requires only a few
hours a day of desk work, with the rest spent traveling to see an
ever-changing list of regional customers. He loves the work, he says."
As any recent college graduate knows, finding a job that is a "good
fit" is a tricky proposition and may take years. Unlike school,
however, the diverse nature of the working world provides many
opportunities to find a job that is accommodating to your needs rather
than the other way around. Perhaps the individuals discussed in this
article could better spend their time exploring who they are and what
they are good at instead of calling attention to their disability by
requesting special accommodations from employers.
re: Accommodating Gen Y's ADD
Over the years I have watched a number of my LSAT students qualify for accomodated testing due to ADD or other reading and/or writing disabilities. I often wonder how students who have required extra time to complete academic work and standardized tests over the course of their undergraduate careers navigate the time pressures of a legal education and a profession that bills by the hour. It's one thing to ask universities and LSAC to allow you more time, but is a client expected to pick up the tab in order to accommodate a practitioner's disability? By the reasoning of the previous poster, it seems that life in a law firm that bills by the hour is not a prudent path for a student who requires extended time allowances for reading and writing assignments.
re: Accommodating Gen Y's ADD
It is extremely easy to obtain a diagnosis. Indeed, the working assumption of education specialists is that that is why you are consulting them. My daughter has had a more difficult time with schooling in the middle grades than my wife or I had. In order to help us understand her needs to assist her for lifelong success we sought consultation with various educational consultants. Even though we explicitly stated up front that we wished none of the reports be written for anyone but ourselves, all still during our post-testing consultation breifing couldn't seem to get outside the mold of presenting things in terms of remediable diagnoses. Anyone with a few hundred bucks to spend can obtain a bonafide letterhead from a PHD selling a diagnosis.
re: Accommodating Gen Y's ADD
Maybe you "can obtain a bonafide letterhead from a PHD selling a diagnosis" but I am uncertain if one can manufacture a two standard deviation difference between performance IQ and verbal ability on the Wechsler Scale of Adult Intelligence. This is the standard that is used by the LSAT to determine if accommodations will be granted and as mentioned by the original poster, it is statistically speaking rare. The fact that only 240 people receive LD accommodations further reinforces this point. Given this, not every individual labelled by their elementary, middle and high schools (and even universities) will receive extended time accommodations.