<p>Tamp down the hyperbole, Slackerdad. There is no comparison between racial discrimination in the workplace and expecting employees to be able to fulfill the basic functions of their job - one of which is getting things done on a timely basis. Even your much more reasonable analogy about maternity leave doesn’t work, in my opinion. Requiring or expecting employers to provide a benefit to employees is very different from requiring or expecting employers to carry employees who just can’t do the work adequately. </p>
<p>I think at this point we may be moving beyond a discussion of whether or not formal accommodations in college go too far (poetgirl is probably right that we’re setting up a strawman, as far as most cases of LD accommodations are concerned) to the problem of students who may be fully academically capable of graduating college, but whose disabilities may nonetheless make holding down a job extremely difficult. </p>
<p>I’m thinking of someone I know who is able to learn material just fine, but has real issues with higher-level reasoning, including reasoning about things like responding to social situations. She may not have had the easiest time in college, but by dint of working hard, avoiding the toughest classes, and putting herself on a five year plan for graduation, she did reasonably well. I don’t actually think she had formal accommodations at all, although she did back in high school. Since college, however, she has lost several jobs - and I don’t think it is because her employers are heartless. Having an employee who, while hard-working and theoretically qualified, can’t adapt to anything the least bit outside the box and doesn’t have a great sense of what is and isn’t appropriate to say in a workplace setting (including to clients) just isn’t an option in most professional fields. Frankly, she needs a relatively low level job where she is working under someone else’s direct supervision and being asked to do specific tasks. Because she has a college degree - and doesn’t fully recognize her own limitations - she expects more than that.</p>
<p>It is a sad situation, but I don’t think there are any villains here. A couple of generations ago, someone like this person would never have been encouraged to go to college, and would have been steered toward a different kind of job. In general, I think it is great that we have stopped writing off people who are cognitively outside the mainstream, but it does lead to some difficult situations when academic capability doesn’t necessarily translate into professional capability. The claim about school being artificial cuts both ways: for a lot of students, difficulty in school doesn’t mean difficulty in the workplace, but in other cases, ability to succeed in school doesn’t mean success in the workplace, either.</p>