The number of students registered with Disability Support Services doubled over the last six years.
About 12 percent of students — 3,052 undergraduates and graduates — were registered with DSS by the end of 2025, up from 6 percent, or 1,657 students, in fall 2019, according to University spokesperson Skyler Sales. More than 10 higher education experts said the surge reflects a national trend of students seeking support before college, rising diagnoses and reduced stigma around accommodations, while students noted that filling DSS vacancies this year improved communication and efficiency, prompting more to register with GW’s DSS office.
Sales said demand for these services — including academic and housing accommodations — remains high even after about 500 registered students graduated last May. 3,038 students were registered with the office as of January, an increase of 475 from 2,563 in August, she said.
Sales attributed the growth in students registering for disability accommodations to heightened awareness, improved services and the 2008 Americans with Disabilities Act amendments, which broadened the definition of disability, granting more people eligibility for accommodations. She added that a “national mental health crisis” has driven more referrals from counseling centers to disability resources, which support students with “invisible” disabilities that people may have dismissed in the past.
GW offers several types of accommodations for students through DSS, including alternative text materials, assistive technology, classroom accessibility, housing accessibility, interpreting and captioning services and test-proctoring services, according to the DSS website. Students seeking accommodations have to submit an application, including necessary documentation and meet with an accessibility associate to discuss their accommodation requests, according to the DSS website.
Sales declined to comment on which accommodations students registered with DSS most commonly request.
Higher education experts and GW students said the rise in accommodations reflects both national trends and recent improvements to GW’s DSS office after years of staffing shortages.
Chris Parthemos, the director of the Student Disability Access Center at the University of Virginia, said there has been growing support for disabled students through additional federal legislation, like Congress’s approval of the ADA in 1990 and its 2008 amendments, greater access to diagnostic services and decreasing stigma around disabilities. He said K-12 schools have built better systems to accommodate students’ needs earlier, permitting more disabled students to learn how to adapt to their disabilities earlier and pursue higher education, where disabilities have become more socially accepted.
About 15 percent of all public school students in 2022-23 were registered with a disability and received special education or related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Just over 11 percent of U.S. undergraduate students reported having disabilities in the 2011-12 academic year, while 2.4 percent of institutions reported having 10 percent or more students registered with disabilities in 2010-11, according to Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data. In the 2019-20 academic year, 20.5 percent of undergraduate students reported having disabilities, while 11.8 percent of institutions reported having 10 percent or more students registered — a spike GW has also experienced.
Parthemos said students often apply for testing accommodations, which has led to a significant increase in demand on testing centers proctoring exams. He said testing centers are designed to make resources consistently available for students with accommodations, alleviating the burden on faculty to implement accommodations in the classroom.
“In my mind, the biggest explanation for the increase we are seeing is a move towards parity in this respect — a larger percentage of students with disabilities are electing to register to receive accommodations,” Parthemos said in an email.
Student Government Association Sen. Jonesy Strell (CCAS-U), who helped to organize a joint town hall with various disability-focused student organizations last month and has historically advocated for disabled students at GW, said DSS has become “more known” within the student body because the office has been tabling and conducting more student outreach, along with DSS Director Rochelle Mills-Garcia attending student organization and Division of Student Affairs events since she assumed her role in early 2024.
Strell said it is also easier and quicker to get accommodations now because officials have alleviated the staffing issues that plagued the office from 2019 to 2023. About half of DSS staff left after struggling with increased workloads due to low staffing and budget, and students in 2023 said the staff vacancies led to competition for services and delayed response times.
Officials doubled the number of DSS staff by November 2024, hiring graduate students and filling vacancies, and a University spokesperson said DSS is now fully staffed and has no vacancies.
“They also have much more staff now, so they even have graduate assistants, which is something they did not have before, so they have much more staff who are able to do the work,” Strell said.
Strell, who is fully deaf in one ear and uses a hearing aid in the other, said he has accommodations for note-taking assistance that allows him to record class lectures using a DSS-approved software called GLEAN. He said he also gets 50 percent extra time on all class exams and quizzes as an accommodation for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Stephanie Cawthon, the executive director of the National Disability Center for Student Success, said all students, even those without accommodations, can benefit from the increase in students registered to receive accommodations because it incentivized faculty to restructure courses in a more accessible way for all students, like permitting flexible seating arrangements.
“As faculty members receive more requests, they change the design of their courses so that they’re not as needing to be accommodated,” Cawthon said. “The courses themselves are more accessible, so that there aren’t as many requests that really require an after-the-fact modification.”
Georgia Cochran, a sophomore who receives both academic and housing accommodations for her anxiety, said communicating with DSS was hard last year because of the staffing issues, and she doesn’t think all students were able to get proper care, though she said the communication between DSS and students has improved this year.
The DSS office’s website displays 11 staff members, consistent with the number of staff they employed in April 2025. The office’s website in April 2025 also listed five student employees, while its current website does not, though a University spokesperson said the office currently has student employees.
“I feel like it’s easier to get in contact with your representative now and stuff, I may be wrong on that, but at least that’s my experience,” Cochran said.
Cochran said she didn’t have accommodations in high school but applied going into her first year at GW because she felt she didn’t have enough time on tests. She said there are some stigmas surrounding accommodations, but increased use of them has made them more normalized among the student body.
Lilly Shaw, a junior and the president of GW Chronic Health Advocates, said DSS has supported her throughout her time at GW, and her DSS caseworker has taken time to meet with her and ensure she was getting the support she needed after adding accommodations mid-semester. She added that she had not experienced any impact because of DSS staffing shortages in past years.
“DSS does incredible work to make students feel supported,” Shaw said in an email. “I am grateful for their assistance through my years at GW so far. In fact, the DSS office has gone above and beyond at times, for example by helping me make testing accommodations when exam dates shifted.”
Heather MacDonald, a sophomore who has a mobility disability, said reduced stigma around neurodivergencies and mental health has resulted in increased accommodations in higher education compared to decades ago, though she said disabilities are still stigmatized. She added accommodations can’t always correct stigmatization by students because they don’t protect disabled students from peers asking invasive questions or from experiencing ableism from peers, though it’s a start.
“Destigmatizing disability starts with accommodation, but can only be fully achieved with education and openness surrounding the topic,” MacDonald said in a message.
MacDonald said she has had accommodations for her disability since she was in elementary school, so by the time she was applying to college, the process for applying for accommodations at GW seemed “simple.”
“I feel like both my parents and me were very used to the process,” MacDonald said. “It wasn’t something new that I had to navigate.”
Keith Altman, the managing partner of K Altman Law, a firm that specializes in special education, said most of the students registering with their school’s disability office and receiving accommodations actually need them.
He said, though, there are likely instances of students registering for accommodations who should not necessarily be eligible for them.
“What percentage of people game the system? I can’t tell you, and I don’t even know how you necessarily can detect it,” Altman said. “I’m sure it happens, but I don’t think that’s leading to the increase.”
