Description
U.S. News ranked Stanford University 4th among national universities in 2025. Last year it was tied with Harvard for 3rd place.
A student says, "There is not really a Disability culture on campus and therefore a lot of folks just aren't aware. One very obvious case is having Professors and supervisors press more with questions asking for a diagnosis when I request accommodations or let them know about my preferred ways of working or communicating."
Disability @ Stanford was launched in 2017 by The Stanford Disability Initiative, "a coalition of students, faculty, and staff who aim to push forward the ongoing need for access rights and disability equity at Stanford University through community-building and academic scholarship." Stanford's website offers the Campus Access Guide, an interactive accessibility map, but some of the features appear to be broken. In 2024, The Stanford Daily reported that 260 (or 94%) of the 274 elevators on campus had expired permits, and broken elevators belied much of the promised accessibility on campus. One student, who lived on the third floor of a residential complex, told The Daily that "Sometimes I would just stay in my room instead of going [downstairs], because it was hard to get up and down [the stairs] so many times."
Approximately 19% of students at Stanford are registered with the Office of Accessible Education. In 2022, The Stanford Daily published an unsettling compilation of comments by members of the community on their struggles with mental health at Stanford. One sophomore wrote, “Mental health at Stanford is an afterthought. The administration’s neglect is single-handedly responsible for my breakdown. I spent 45 minutes on hold with CAPS during an emergency trying to get help before my parents rushed to get me.”
In 2019, Stanford settled a class-action lawsuit with Disability Rights Advocates for its “egregious” policies that coerced students experiencing mental health crises into taking leaves of absence. According to reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education, “students said they had been falsely accused by administrators of disrupting the lives of their friends and had generally been treated as if they had committed behavioral infractions rather than simply asking for treatment, in an appropriate manner, for their disabilities during times of crisis.” One student told the reporter that, in recent years, students who were hospitalized for psychiatric treatment would “effectively disappear from campus.”
Stanford has a student-run peer counseling center open 24 hours.