Dramatic changes in education have occurred in the last twenty years due to technological developments, including social media, smartphones, increasing access to the internet, the move to learning management systems, the growth of online classes, and artificial intelligence, just to name a few. Most recently, a global pandemic caused higher education institutions to experiment with remote learning and different course models such as HyFlex. In the same twenty years, two different generations, demographically distinct from previous generations of college students, have moved into universities with the expectation that a college education is necessary for success. As such, it is unsurprising that higher education needs have shifted. Yet, in many ways, higher education has not changed at all. Structurally, it is more of the same in terms of the scheduling of classes, classroom management, syllabus policies, grading and assessment, and accommodations. The gates of academia may seem open to all who wish to attend, yet the academic cultural walls are hard to climb once inside. The structures and systems of higher education are predisposed to accept and support specific types of students with specific expectations for those students, based on long-held higher education conceptions of intelligence and how it is demonstrated in the classroom. Bernard Stiegler articulates deep attention as being needed to solve the "battle for intelligence" and to counteract the problems of ADHD. This conception fits with the structural setup of higher education, ignoring the diverse forms of brain function, behaviors, and intelligence that exist among the student population and the world. Notions of the hegemonic good student, academic excellence, and cultural capital acquired in higher education's hidden curriculum are tied up in conceptions of attention that reach back to Eurocentric ideas of learning. However, neurodivergent students and their capacities do not fit so neatly into the boxes of higher education, and neither do their forms of attention; yet, often, these students are penalized through classroom management policies and traditional ideas of structured education. Rather than trying to force these students into such boxes, this paper will argue it is necessary to reconceptualize what deep attention might be for these students and what educational possibilities exist if that is done.