A Stanford student recently exposed fellow pupils at the top US university of faking their religious faith over a money hack related to campus meal plans. An article by Ella Johnson, a 21-year-old junior at the private research university in California, was published by The Times on Monday (US time).
Therein, she called out students she knew who had claimed to “be devout members of the Jain faith” simply to prioritise spending their meal money at supermarkets selling “yummy dishes” instead of not-so appetising college meals.
Disclaimer: Stanford University has yet to issue an official statement to address the allegations.
Stanford students faking ‘Jainism’ claim
As per Johnson’s account shared in The Times article, students “gaming” the system lied their way out of a meal plan that most on-campus undergraduates are urged to purchase. The Stanford meal plan in question is worth $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. And a feasible means of being exempted from it is establishing one’s “religious dietary restriction,” which can’t be accommodated by the college kitchens.
Since the Jain faith rejects any food that could cause harm to living creatures, including small insects and root vegetables, students who aren’t Jain still push the claim of following the religious faith to opt out of college-mandated meal plans. By doing so, they are able to “enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes” at Whole Foods, while others are “stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from mushroom mix,” Johnson wrote in The Times piece.
The Stanford University student further established that since challenging a religious dietary claim could risk a discrimination lawsuit, administrators leave the issue as it is.
Other ways US college students are lying to get benefits
Looking back at a conversation she had with an upperclassman friend, Johnson said, “She wasn’t proud of gaming the system and she wasn’t ashamed either. She was simply rational. The university had created a set of incentives and she had simply responded to them.”
Here, “gaming the system” doesn’t simply refer to students lying about their religious faith. Earlier in the article, the Stanford student also shed light on some students availing the privilege of a single room through the college granting them “a disability accommodation.”
Johnson admitted that while her upperclassman pal didn’t have a disability, she was simply making the most of the Office of Accessible Education giving students a single room and extra time on tests among other exemptions if they qualify as “disabled.”
“The most common disability accommodation students ask for — and receive — is the best housing on campus,” Johnson wrote.
In addition to Johnson sharing a personally witnessed account, The Atlantic had previously reported about a surging numbers of students at top universities claiming they had disabilities, simply to get benefits. The report even mentioned that some claiming to suffer from “social anxiety” could skip participating in class discussions.
As per The Atlantic, 38% of undergraduates at Johnson’s college, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, were registered as having a disability. It resulted in 24% of undergrad students getting academic or housing accommodation in the fall quarter despite the tough competition to land a space on campus.
The report further shared that more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled at Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard. Shockingly, only 3 to 4% of students receive disability accommodations at community colleges in the US.
Johnson herself has since claimed her “legitimate illness” endometriosis as a disability at Stanford. “It is a painful condition in which cells from the uterus grow outside the womb,” she explains in The Times article. “I’m often doubled over in agony from the problem, for which there is no known cure, so I decided to ask for a single room in a campus dorm where I could endure those moments in private.”
Within 30 minutes of an appointment with an advisor to discuss her symptoms and diagnosis, Johnson was registered as a student with disability. Thereafter, she was granted a single housing assignment, extra absence from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of her classes.