Why Some Colleges Do Not Have Adequate Mental Health Services

Despite the benefits to individual students, the student body, and the college itself, far too many students are not getting adequate mental health care on college campuses. The reasons are varied, but as you explore the state of mental heath services at your child's school, you'll find that the most common reason for weak mental health services is money.

Higher education is a business. And like any other business, it strives to offer a quality product at a reasonable price. But in a bad economy (as we've seen lately) colleges face a double problem: their endowment is reduced, and the demand for scholarship funds increases. This puts tremendous pressure on the school to make decisions about what programs must be cut and what programs need to grow. Some obvious considerations for the school are to increase resources for programs that are bringing in revenues (students and research) and to shrink areas that don't show obvious economic advantages (student services).

So who is going to pay to support strong student services in a counseling center? The enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act and mental health parity laws require colleges to meet the special needs of these students, but some say that only students who use the mental health center should be charged a student fee to cover their care. I disagree. We do not charge only the physically disabled students to cover the cost of installing ramps and elevators to meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This is no different. Whether the costs are buried in the tuition or covered by a special student fee, everyone should pay equally.

But when money is short, something's got to give. Nationwide, budget cuts are causing many departments in colleges and universities around the country to cut staff positions, mental health staff included. When this happens, services to students are affected. The two most troubling changes caused by staff reductions that I've observed in colleges in my area in eastern Massachusetts are the effect on the remaining staff and the effect on their programs.

At a time when student mental health needs are increasing at unprecedented rates, fewer staff members means more work for those remaining and less attention for the students. When the workload becomes unmanageable, staff become vulnerable to stress and burnout. Counselors who themselves are suffering psychologically are little help to the students.

Second, budget cuts have caused some colleges to make a major program shift. Time and money are frequently siphoned away from the traditional prevention and education programs directed at all students and refocused on reactive programs that address the immediate needs of students with severe psychological problems who are in crisis. Ironically, this shift that weakens prevention programs leads to more crisis situations.

Cutting the budget for mental health services in this time of increased need and demand is ethically and legally risky. Why wait for a student tragedy before suddenly providing money for the problem? Prevention is a far better investment. Unfortunately, some colleges are learning this in retrospect.

After tragic suicides at Harvard and MIT, school administrators formed committees to review their mental health services and make recommendations about how to improve them. The committees recommended a series of changes that resulted in budget increases ($838,000 at MIT and a 15 percent budget boost at Harvard) to hire more staff, conduct screening and outreach campaigns to encourage troubled students to seek counseling, improve infrastructure and support, boost social marketing, and provide more timely and accessible services.⁴ These are important changes that all schools need to implement regardless of the economic climate and before a crisis hits.