It is my impression, which I think is shared by a few others, that more young people seem to be having psychological problems and that there is also a growing cohort of them with food allergies. Some may have both. If one assumes these things are true, the major question is why there are increasing numbers in each category.
A few minor questions, likely to be raised by a skeptic or contrarian, have to do with the attempt to ascertain which of these psychological issues and dietary ones are more important than others. Psychological disabilities can be more difficult to diagnose and confirm than physical ones and there needs to be a distinction between actual food allergies and dietary preferences, such as, for example, those required for religious reasons.
University settings where young people abound, yield data about such things and here are two articles from campuses about, disabilities and dining. Both indicate that there are indeed more students signing up for clinical help and complaining about the dining halls. Whereas administrators used to be employed to mainly support the faculty and those working in the physical plant, now more are needed to attend to the mental problems of students. The increasing demand is affecting universities with decreasing budgets, which would be most of them here in Ontario.
I am in the contrarian camp when it comes to the psychological issues as you may recall from my recent related post about, "Prevalence Inflation." (See also: "The PTSD Pandemic," and "STRESS - A Contrarian View.") About the increase in allergies, I am curious, but I think that many who complain about food have too much of it and that generally most things one chews on will not result in an anaphylactic shock.
Here are the views of others. The first article is a Canadian one and it is followed by an American example, indicating the "disability problem" is also occurring there. The dietary issues follow. (The articles are not provided in full and the bolding is mine.)
Disabilities
"As Demand for Disability Accommodations in Universities Grows, Professors Contend With How to Handle Students’ Requests," Joe Friesen, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 27, 2024 (also the source for the graph.)
"In Thomas Abrams’s second-year sociology course at Queen’s University in Kingston last year, about one-third of students were registered with the school’s disabilities office.
That means they were eligible for academic accommodations, which can apply to classroom delivery as well as assessment, and can range from more time on assignments to a semi-private room for exams and a memory cue sheet to assist them.
One-third of a single class might sound high, but it’s also increasingly the norm. More than 6,000 of the roughly 28,000 students at Queen’s last year (22 per cent) were approved for such accommodations by the disabilities office. Five years ago, it was about 2,250 students (9 per cent).....
“We are faced with a complex pedagogical, human rights, privacy, labour and psychological issue,” he said.
What’s happening at Queen’s is part of a trend that’s apparent across Ontario and the rest of Canada. The number of students registering with disabilities at universities has rapidly increased, causing resources to become strained. The shift has also raised questions about the fairness of accommodations and triggered frustration among professors who are unsure how to handle the volume of requests...."
Often, these students’ conditions aren’t physical or visible. Three-quarters of those registered with Queen’s Student Accessibility Services (QSAS) have a disability that is not physical: 33 per cent have a mental-health disability, 29 per cent have ADHD and 14 per cent have a learning disability. Most of the growth in accommodation requests across the province over the past decade has been in those three categories...."
An independent report commissioned by Queen’s to examine the university’s accommodations policies, prompted by the rapid increase in student needs and a desire to assess the fairness and adequacy of those policies, was released in June...."
The report’s authors said they couldn’t discern the reason for the recent increase but described a perception across campus that Queen’s has been hit by a “tsunami” of students asking for accommodations."
This is the article talking about the situation in the United States.
"Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?"
Higher ed’s maximally inclusive approach hurts those it attempts to help," Chronicle of Higher Education, By Alan Levinovitz September 25, 2024
"Disability accommodations in American higher education are skyrocketing. In the past decade, the proportion of colleges with more than 10 percent of students registered as disabled has quintupled, and accommodation requests have followed the same pattern. Despite increased staff and resources, disability-service providers are overwhelmed, and it’s common for a single staff member to be tasked with serving 500 students. Faculty are also reporting increased workloads as they find themselves continually adjusting teaching and assessment practices.
Providing an accessible education to everyone is a crucial civil-rights issue, one that went unaddressed in this country for far too long. Discrimination against people with disabilities was standard practice until the introduction of legal protections like Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1973 and the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Without these protections, blind students would have no recourse if their community college failed to provide accessible versions of textbooks and library materials, and deaf students participating in online classes would not be entitled to closed-captioning. Even with robust laws in place, disabilities are frequently missed or dismissed, a problem compounded by racial and socioeconomic disparities.
Concern about the validity of surging accommodation requests may therefore seem misplaced. To a certain extent, the trend is a positive development: the product of increased awareness, better screening practices, and less institutional discrimination. We should worry about students’ rising rates of mental-health disorders, many disability advocates say, not the willingness of colleges to accommodate them.
However, a suite of acute, well-documented problems with disability accommodations demand attention. The data is clear, for instance, that a significant minority of diagnoses are fraudulent or mistaken. In many cases, there is no empirical basis for granting common accommodation requests like extended time or distraction-free testing. And there is further evidence that the current state of disability accommodation compounds inequities in student achievement, rather than alleviating them.
Students and instructors are rightfully concerned about fairness and compromised rigor. Resources are being misallocated to unproven interventions and students who don’t need them. Worst of all, the interventions may be harming some of the students they are intended to help, exacerbating their mental-health problems and setting them up for a lifetime of struggle.
Colleges have remained complacent about the status quo for a variety of reasons. Since they want to support students and avoid lawsuits, administrators are incentivized to pursue a maximally inclusive approach to accommodation. Disability advocates fear, understandably, that calling attention to these issues will result in public backlash, creating more stigma around disability and threatening hard-won rights. Outside of academe, alarmism about accommodations has been associated with ableism and culture wars. While researching this piece, multiple people refused to speak with me about their misgivings on the record. There is a chilling effect at work, resulting in a lopsided discussion that leaves educators, students, and the public poorly informed.
However understandable the reluctance to criticize disability accommodations, refusing to do so is antithetical to the mission of higher education. Inaction harms students both with and without disabilities, allows for continued misallocation of limited resources, and calls the integrity of our institutional practices into question. We have a duty to engage in even-handed, critical reflection and pursue necessary reforms — even when it makes us uncomfortable."
Dining
"The New Reality for College Dining Halls: Dozens of Dietary Restrictions:
A surge of students with allergies and special diets is challenging meal services and changing the shape of the campus cafeteria, Priya Krishna NYT - Sept. 5, 2023.
For the staff of the Michigan State University dining halls, serving roughly 27,000 students each semester has never been a picnic. But these days, the job involves an even bigger challenge: One in six of those students has an allergy or other dietary restriction. Just five years ago, it was one in eight.
Once upon a time, running a college meal service was fairly straightforward: Put out one entree, one dessert, maybe a salad bar. Today, dining halls must cater to a student body with increasingly varied and complicated needs and preferences.
Some 6.2 percent of adults in the United States have a food allergy, according to a 2021 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number reflects only medically diagnosed allergies, and doesn’t include all the restricted diets that many younger people are adopting.
Robert Landolphi, the assistant director of culinary operations at the University of Connecticut, said t
hat two decades ago, “you had your handful of peanut and tree-nut allergies, and back then we had maybe two people with gluten-free diets.” Today, he said, more than 10 percent of those on meal plans have some sort of dietary restriction.Several dining hall managers and dietitians said they do their best to meet each student’s needs, but acknowledged that it can be difficult and cost-prohibitive to accommodate all of them — especially the less-common requests....
At the University of Connecticut, Mr. Landolphi recalled a student who told him that for animal protein, he ate only fish heads, organ meats and bone broth — and that the dining hall should serve a similar menu, for the sake of student health."
There were many comments about this article. Here is one that I chose:
COMMENT:
"I am a school nurse and am just APPALLED by all of this.
Toughen up people!
True, there are those with life threatening food allergies but for the most part whatever 'sensitivities' students may have can be taken care of with avoidance or a little Benadryl.
What it says loud and clear is that the parents, and their parenting, of this college generation were hovering too closely overhead making their kids afraid of everything, keeping everything TOO clean so their immune systems now are so untested and their anxiety levels are so high that they'll breakout in a rash over anything.
It's just a precursor to how they're going to be handling the outside real world : Badly, quivering at every new experience that may cross their path. And then, God help us all- and save us from the spoiled generation..in other words
GROW UP."
