Oh ho ho, please, let me thread about my experience as a mature student with adhd in university... https://twitter.com/saranahmed/status/928651954049437697

So first of all, no matter what a university tells you, no matter how high their mature student enrollment, it’s not designed for you. It’s designed for 18 year olds.

And being 18 is fucking hard. I wasn’t in university when I was 18, I was in performing arts college. University is a whole different ball game. It relies on you not having developed certain skills yet. Those skills? Knowing your boundaries.

Because when you know your boundaries, when you know what works for you and what doesn’t, and when you’re not feeling the crunch to get it all done in 4 years, you walk from bad professors.

People walking on classes and teachers that don’t work for them would be really, really bad for universities. Which is why scholarships are geared towards high school grads. Why the message is that you can’t get a job without a degree is so strong.

Which brings me to my point about adhd - and this probably applies to most accommodations. There’s this weird combination of tell-don’t tell that universities play. Where if they don’t know exactly your condition they can’t be blamed for being discriminatory.

So they ask you to request accommodation, of which they have limited “solutions” on offer. They don’t want to know the condition you have or how it affects you. They just ask for what you need-as long as it fits into the accommodations they provide.

Those accommodations are things like more time on tests, flexible deadlines, and permission to use electronic devises to take notes. But if you go and ask for... say... less group work. That accommodation doesn’t exist.

There’s also this thing where accommodation can only be received for symptoms, not for best possible outcomes. So every semester for the past 3 years I’ve gotten medical accommodation for anxiety and depression like symptoms due to unmanaged adhd.

But I can’t get medical accommodation until I’m in crisis. I’m not allowed to set up a learning experience that works for me. I have to struggle through something that hurts me until it hurts me to the point where I can get paperwork.

But there’s no university that will tell you they’re not inclusive. Or that they don’t accommodate students - because they do - eventually. Once they’ve driven those students into the ground.

And if I wasn’t a mature student, I would’ve still had that 18 year old “go-go-go all nighter, profs know better than me, I need this now” attitude that I had at 18.

But the truth is they don’t know better. The university doesn’t know better. And the system is built to cover their ass so they can keep making money.

Since second year I’ve had people approaching me to do work that one should have a degree for, but that my life experience and the way my brain works makes me incredibly qualified for.

So under the pretense of learning/industry experience, students are exploited for labor - often at a level that they should be getting paid much more for. Instead they’re making $12/hour, or worse - working for free.

And we call this entrepreneurship. And we call it revolutionary in education. And we call it preparing them for the world. But when they’ve already lived in the world and they call you on your shit, we let them suffer in a system that was never built for them.

Universities say they’re inclusive. They’re not. They are money making machines that use people and exploit youth for a system that will do the same.