It was discrimination, pure and simple, said the two student whistle-blowers.
The admissions dean at New College of Florida “was trying to ‘weed out’ people with disabilities and mental-health problems in our prospective student pool,” they wrote, in a public complaint. “She said this in meetings, as well as casually to admissions department workers. She actively instructed people to red-flag essays where students disclosed mental-health issues and disabilities. We believe this may be a violation of the ADA. If it is indeed illegal behavior, she was making others complicit in the process.”
In the case where a student self-discloses a mental-health issue, we take further steps.
The inspector general’s office of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees the state’s public universities, investigated the claims by Maria Simmerling and Eugenia Quintanilla, who have since graduated. This week, it determined that there very likely was discrimination. The admissions director, Joy Hamm, has been replaced by an interim director, and a search for a permanent director will begin in January. New College is reviewing its admissions procedures, its president, Donal O’Shea, wrote in a statement. The college will also “commission an independent review of the materials of applicants from the 2018 and 2019 admissions cycles who self-disclosed disabilities or mental-health issues and will take any necessary appropriate actions.”
Hamm, whom the college says resigned on August 16, could not be reached for comment but denied to Florida investigators “ever expressing that application files should be ‘red-flagged’ for disclosing a mental-health issue or disability.’” A source close to the situation says that Hamm is seeking counsel in possible pursuit of a lawsuit.
The particulars of New College’s process may be unique to that institution, as were the personality frictions involved. Hamm, who took the position of admissions and financial-aid director in 2017, told investigators, in the report’s words, that “stricter policies and oversight, physical reorganization of staff, and increased accountability, which were not well accepted by staff … earned her ‘fast hatred.’”
But current and former admissions officers at other colleges say that if applications have essays about mental-health histories, marking those files for further review is a widespread, necessary, common-sense measure.
Colleges can’t discriminate, nor, in a period of sagging enrollment, would they want to, these experts say. But institutions also have to ensure that prospective students have the health resources they need and that campuses are as safe as possible. As treatment and medication of students rise and stigma declines, how colleges perceive essays about mental-health problems “is an increasingly common question,” says Kristen E. Willmott, a senior private counselor at the consultancy Top Tier Admissions and a former Harvard admissions and financial-aid officer.
These current and former admissions officers generally advise students against writing about their mental-health history for the simple reason that it might detract from colleges’ views of an applicant as a potential contributor to the institution. But some disagree, arguing that students who have wrestled with their problems and circumstances often end up wiser and stronger from that struggle.
Gabrielle (who asked to be identified only by her first name) is a rising senior at a public university in New England. She wrote her college-application essay about the anxiety, depression, and agoraphobia she has struggled with since elementary school, although, she says, she didn’t include all the “gruesome details of depression and intrusive thoughts.” She is studying advertising and marketing for fashion and social media, and would like to design clothes. She urges colleges not to look at applicants like her “as a problem that you may need to help.” Rather, just as colleges do with any other student, “give them an opportunity to find their better selves.”
‘We Take Further Steps’
Top Tier’s Willmott says that no college or university wants to be sued, like Stanford was, for allegedly coercing students with mental-health problems to take leaves of absence rather than try to treat them on campus. (Stanford says that suit is now paused as the parties attempt mediation.) Instead, says Willmott, colleges want to carefully vet incoming students, not out of bias but to realistically assess the students’ chances of success.
“The uberselective schools suck up all the news,” says Michael Thorp, associate vice president for enrollment at York College of Pennsylvania who has 35 years’ experience in admissions at various institutions. “All of the rest of us are trying to get students enrolled and trying to provide what’s needed. It’s an inclusion model, not an exclusion model. We’re looking for ways to accommodate students.”
But it’s an inclusion model with safeguards.
“In the case where a student self-discloses a mental-health issue,” Thorp says, “we take further steps.”
“A York admissions staff member would never make an admission decision based on mental health, because we are not trained mental-health professionals,” he says. The admissions office discusses such cases with campus psychologists and staff members in academic support to see “if we as an institution can properly support that student.” Only twice in Thorp’s decades of experience has a counseling office determined that a student poses a safety risk and should not be admitted.
Red-flagging for further review is “absolutely” the norm at colleges nationwide, Thorp says. “We’re judged, rated, and ranked based on retention rates, and for good reason,” he says. “If we can’t provide the services you need to complete the degree in a timely manner, we’re not doing our job.”
If an application is reviewed and the student accepted, Thorp says, “the record stays within the counseling office. It does not get attached to the student’s record.” He points out that federal privacy law contains a clause known as “need to know.” “If a faculty member makes an inquiry to support services, and the counseling office determines there is a professional need to know,” he says, “they will disclose it, but the counseling office, trained professionals, are the arbiters.”
‘You Had to Tag It’
At New York University in 2010, in the wake of suicides on campus, admissions staff members and other administrators all looked back, wondering if they had missed signs of serious psychiatric problems. There was a clear understanding, says Nat Smitobol, an admissions counselor for the consultancy Ivywise, who worked in admissions at NYU and Skidmore College, “that if anyone ever talked about mental health, you had to tag it” for review by counseling staff and higher-ups, and it was inferred that “if something happens, they could go back to the application and see who read it.”
Now, as an application adviser and upper-school dean at Poly Prep Country Day School, in Brooklyn, he tells students that there may be essays they need to write for a sense of catharsis, and application essays they need to write to show why they should be chosen for a spot at a selective college. But, he says, those two kinds of essays “don’t often overlap.”
There are exceptions, he says. “I’ve had former students write about topics that would be tagged by an admissions reader, and that’s not to say that you can’t have anger or strong feelings about what you went through, but it has to be clear to the reader that the author has come to terms with it.”
That sense of resolution, of lessons learned and experience absorbed, is key, say several in the field.
Michael Reilly, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, wrote in an email that the association doesn’t have an official position on the matter, but that he thinks that “unless the applicant feels the disclosure of mental-health issues helps explain an absence or a temporary downturn in academic performance,” she or he “should not disclose that with the admissions application.”
Occasionally, says the clinical psychologist Taisha L. Caldwell-Harvey, a mental-health analyst for the University of California system, as well as a therapist in private practice, application essays about mental-health problems are so alarming that they compel college staff members to contact students or authorities. Those essays can be “a cry for help,” but “this is not the best way to do it,” Caldwell-Harvey says: Even if admissions and other staff pick up on the problem, it’s often months later.
‘As Real as Cancer’
Casey Nichols tried to delicately thread the needle, examining her struggles without revealing too much.
Nichols, who will be a freshman at Mount Holyoke College this fall, wrote a 10-page paper comprehensively documenting her history of anxiety and depression, exacerbated by a series of concussions (one from competitive ski jumping), possible chronic Lyme disease, and the recent suicide of a beloved, gregarious uncle who may have suffered from bipolar disorder or repeated sports head injuries. That long paper, says Nichols, was “a therapeutic exercise.”
But her 650-word college essay was a different animal.
For that, at the suggestion of a family friend who worked in admissions advising, Nichols alluded to her own depression only in an indirect way.
“I have seen how suicide is a mix of heartbreak, anger, and a constant wonder of what could have been,” she wrote. “Depression is an illness as real as cancer, it just can’t be seen. I know that I can use what I and my family have gone through to help others. I do not want to hide it as there is nothing to be ashamed of.”
Nichols, of Lyme, N.H., did not include the fact that she herself had been hospitalized for a month at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass. for anxiety and depression, and how important and helpful that hospitalization was, even if she did have to scramble to make up some missed school time. In the essay, she didn’t connect the dots. She didn’t try to explain that her parents’ tenderness toward the uncle, their strong belief in getting the help one needs, proved pivotal for the way Nichols saw her own situation.
“That kindesss toward him led me to want to get help of my own,” she says. “In a way, I think his death saved my life.”
And if she were writing the essay all over again, Nichols still wouldn’t include all of her own history, out of apprehension over how it might be received.
She says she has “learned from this experience, and I’ve not conquered it but I’m on my way to and I want to help others who haven’t conquered their illness yet.” Toward that goal, having become fascinated by the workings of the brain, Nichols wants to study neuropsychology and minor in the arts with an emphasis on portrait drawing, perhaps becoming an art therapist. Although ski-jumping is out of the picture — too much risk of concussion — she’s excited about having been recruited for the rowing team and is on a cardio and weight-room tear as the semester approaches.
Not everyone agrees that steering around or playing down mental-health issues is the wisest choice. Students receive decidedly mixed signals.
“Nobody should be discriminated against for having a mental-health challenge,” says John MacPhee, executive director of the suicide-prevention group the Jed Foundation. “If colleges flag applications to check that the institutions have adequate support services, the institutions should be transparent about that.”
“We’re in an interesting time,” he says. On one hand, mental-health histories clearly set off some alarms. On the other hand, the stigma continues to decline, and the National Institutes of Health recently cosponsored a “Speaking Up About Mental Health” essay competition for teens.
“I’ve seen a shift in how students share,” says Michelle Reider, director of traditional undergraduate admissions at Biola University, in California, who has worked in admissions for 12 years. “Talking about mental-health struggles is just so normal now. It’s not a hush-hush thing. They see it as part of their identity and their journey.”
Biola’s application essay question, Reider says, encourages applicants to write about mental-health tribulations. The Christian university asks students how they’ve grown, especially in their faith, during the past three years.
“That is an open door,” Reider says. “Mental health comes up often. We’re glad to hear about their process.” The essays help the university offer such students the best resources if they are admitted, she says. “This would not hurt their chance of admission.”
“It would genuinely shock me if the discriminatory practices Maria and I uncovered at New College were not actively present at other higher education institutions as well,” Quintanilla, one of the New College whistle-blowers, wrote to The Chronicle in response to the Board of Governors’ ruling, “especially in private ones, which are subject to less regulation. ... Among the many systemic barriers that prevent students of all backgrounds from gaining an education, mental-health conditions, past experiences with abuse and trauma, and disabilities should ... never be leveraged against any student as an indication that they are not college ready.”
‘This Is Just Who I Am’
A rising sophomore named Anamika, who asked to be identified only by her first name, weighed how much to disclose about her struggle with depression, anxiety, and PTSD in her application to transfer to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from the Wentworth Institute of Technology, in Boston.
“I was kind of scared when I submitted it, because you never know how people are going to react,” she says. “That’s really the only sense they get of your personality, and I didn’t want them to think that I had low drive and can’t get things done.” Ultimately, she turned in the very personal essay, she says, because “this is just who I am.” Adapted from an AP English paper that explored how she and her siblings were emotionally abused by their mother, who also thinks anxiety is a joke and that depression isn’t real, the paper made one sister cry in recognition and brought Anamika closer to her father. It helped him understand, she says, that, counter to the stigma of mental illness in their Indian American culture, she needed help.
She got it, starting therapy, as are two of her three sisters, and her parents are divorcing.
Following her acceptance, the university followed up with information about campus mental-health resources and psychiatrists who could oversee and prescribe her medication.
“It’s kind of reassuring,” she says, “the fact that they reached out in an email to let me know.”
Anamika plans to study architecture, with an emphasis on sustainability. She hopes colleges understand, when they read essays like hers, that challenges don’t need to be visible to be real. Serotonin depletion for a depressed student is, she says, every bit as palpable as a broken arm for the captain of a softball team.
Colleges want students who have proved themselves against formidable odds?
The very act of recognizing mental illness, getting help for it, and writing about it, says Anamika, “takes a lot of strength.”
Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
