Picture your class for a moment.

Maybe it's a lecture hall with 80 students. Maybe it's a seminar with 18. Maybe it's an online section you've never met in person. Wherever you're teaching, take a mental scan of the students in front of you (or behind their profile pictures) and ask yourself: How many of them have a disability?

If you said one or two, you're probably thinking of the students you know about. The one who mentioned they have an accommodation letter. The one you've seen using a screen reader. Maybe the one who uses a wheelchair and sits near the door.

The actual number is almost certainly much higher—and most of those students will never tell you.

What the Data Actually Shows

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that approximately 21 percent of undergraduate students in the United States have a disability; that's roughly one in five students in any given course. The American College Health Association's most recent National College Health Assessment found that more than 40 percent of college students reported being diagnosed with or treated for a mental health condition in the past year, with anxiety and depression consistently ranking among the top health concerns affecting academic performance.

Let that land for a moment: in a class of 30 students, you may have six or more students with a documented disability. In a class of 80, that number could be 16 or more.

And those are only the students who have been diagnosed.

Many students arrive at college without a formal diagnosis, having navigated their differences through sheer determination, supportive families, or luck. Others received support in K-12 that they no longer have access to, because the system that identified and served them doesn't follow them to college. Still others are managing conditions that emerged or intensified during the stress of early adulthood: anxiety that became debilitating, depression that arrived without warning, a chronic illness that was diagnosed sophomore year.

These students are in your classroom. They are trying to succeed. And many of them are working significantly harder than their peers just to access the same material.

The Disability You're Probably Not Picturing

When most instructors think about disability in the college classroom, they think about blindness, deafness, or a student who uses a wheelchair. These are real and important - and they represent a small fraction of the disability landscape in higher education.

The more common picture looks like this:

  • A student who reads at grade level but takes twice as long because her brain processes text differently. 
  • A student who knows the material cold but freezes on timed exams because his anxiety spikes the moment the clock starts. 
  • A student who has missed three classes this semester not because they don’t care, but because they have Crohn's disease and some mornings their body simply doesn't cooperate. 
  • A student who takes meticulous notes but can't turn them into a coherent paper because the executive function challenges that come with ADHD make initiating tasks feel like moving through concrete.

None of these students may have told you anything. And all of them are navigating your course with barriers that their peers don't have.

According to the University of Michigan, dyslexia alone affects an estimated 20 percent of the population, making it one of the most common learning differences in existence. ADHD affects approximately 2 to 8 percent of college students, according to research cited in the NIH Natinoal Library of Medicine. Approximately 1 out of 31 children has autism, according to the CDC. NEA Today reports that 44% of college students experience depression symptoms, while 37% reported experiencing anxiety. 

These are not niche conditions. They are among the most common human experiences - and higher education has historically been designed as though they don't exist.

Why Most Students Don't Tell You

If disability is this common, why don't more students come forward?

The reasons are layered—and understanding them matters.

The process is a barrier in itself. 

In higher education, students must voluntarily self-identify to their institution's disability services office, provide documentation of their disability, and then choose to share their accommodation letter with each instructor individually. For a student who is already managing a condition that affects their energy, executive function, or anxiety levels, that process can feel insurmountable—especially early in a semester when they're still figuring out whether they even need help.

Disclosure carries risk. 

Students with invisible disabilities often report that disclosing leads to skepticism from peers who think they're "gaming the system," and sometimes from instructors who question whether the accommodation is really necessary. When disclosure feels like an invitation to be doubted, many students choose silence instead.

They don't know they qualify. 

A student who has always struggled with reading but was never formally diagnosed with dyslexia doesn't know to walk into disability services. A student managing anxiety with medication may not realize that anxiety is a covered disability under the ADA. A student with a chronic illness may not know that their condition entitles them to accommodations. 

Many students who would benefit from support simply don't know it's available to them.

They've learned to hide it. 

Students with disabilities—particularly invisible ones—often spend years developing coping strategies that allow them to pass as neurotypical or non-disabled. By the time they reach college, hiding the struggle can feel automatic. Asking for help can feel like admitting failure.

The result is a significant population of students who are present in your classroom, struggling in ways you can't see, and not asking for the support they need.

This Is Not About Lowering the Bar

Here is the concern that comes up most often when instructors engage with this topic, and it deserves a direct response.

"If we accommodate every student who says they have a struggle, aren't we just making college easier? Isn't part of the college experience learning to push through difficulty?"

It's a fair question. And the answer is: accessible education is not about making college easier. It is about making sure that the productive struggle your students experience is actually related to the learning you're trying to measure.

Consider what a timed exam in a crowded lecture hall actually measures. Your goal is to assess mastery of the content - but the format itself introduces additional variables that have nothing to do with what a student knows. The ability to perform under time pressure in a high-stimulation environment is being measured alongside content knowledge, whether you intended to assess it or not. For most students, those conditions are uncomfortable, but manageable. For a student with ADHD, severe test anxiety, or an auditory processing disorder, they can be genuinely disabling—and the result is a grade that reflects the format as much as the learning.

When you give a student with dyslexia extended time on a reading-heavy exam, you are not lowering the bar. You are removing a variable that was never part of your learning goal in the first place. The bar—demonstrating mastery of the content—stays exactly where it is. What changes is that the format no longer gets in the way of the student showing you what they have learned.

Research supports this distinction. Studies consistently show that extended time benefits students with disabilities by relieving the pressure and giving them opportunities to engage more deeply with the material—which is precisely what you'd expect if the accommodation is correcting for a genuine disadvantage rather than creating an unfair one.

What This Means for How You Teach

The good news is that many of the most effective strategies for supporting students with disabilities are also simply good teaching.

  • Posting your slides before class benefits students who use screen readers - and students who learn better when they can preview the structure of a lecture.
  • Captioning your videos is required for students who are deaf - and useful for students who are English language learners, students in noisy environments, and students who process information better visually. 
  • Breaking a large assignment into scaffolded steps with checkpoints supports students with executive function challenges - and every student who has ever stared at a blank page wondering where to start.

This is the principle behind Universal Design for Learning (UDL) - a research-based framework that guides educators in designing courses that work for a wider range of learners from the start, rather than retrofitting them for individual students after the fact. When you build flexibility, clarity, and multiple pathways into your course design, you reduce barriers for students with disabilities—and you improve the experience for everyone else at the same time.

You don't have to overhaul your entire course to make a difference. You don't have to become an expert in every disability category. You don't have to have all the answers before a student comes to you with an accommodation letter.

You just have to start somewhere.

A Different Way to See Your Classroom

The students who need accessible education are not a small, separate group at the margins of your course. They are distributed throughout your roster - often invisible, often silent, often working harder than you know.

One in five undergraduates has a disability. Millions more are managing conditions that affect their learning without a formal diagnosis or an accommodation letter. And whether they're pursuing a major requirement, career goal, or personal interest, every student deserves a chance to succeed in your course.

The question is not whether accessible education is worth the effort for a few students. The question is whether the course you've designed serves the full range of students who are already there.