Kitty S. Harris is in demand right now. For years, as director of the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery, at Texas Tech University, she has run one of the first and most successful campus-based recovery programs, which help students with drug or alcohol addictions stay sober in one of the most challenging places to do so. With the growth of those programs, she and the 25-year-old center have been in the news a lot, leading to hundreds of e-mails from peers congratulating her, parents begging for Texas Tech to admit children they have in recovery, and reporters asking for interviews. Just this Sunday, Ms. Harris and the program were featured on NBC’s Today show.
But from officials of other colleges, Ms. Harris gets e-mails every week asking how they can start their own campus-based recovery communities.
Answering that question is one of her biggest challenges, because she doesn’t have the facts that colleagues can use to make the case for such programs.
But that is about to change this fall, with a survey of students in what Ms. Harris says is finally a critical mass of campus-based recovery programs.
Stories of students remaking their lives in collegiate recovery programs, like the one she oversees, may be plentiful and touching, but for now they’re only anecdotes.
“Everybody operates under the assumptions that these programs make a difference,” Ms. Harris says. She agrees, of course. “But there is no research.”
Not only does the lack of research mean that counselors have nothing to show skeptical administrators. It also means no data to provide in grant proposals—and, consequently, fewer grants.
Many counselors have hard facts about their own programs, showing that students in recovery are less likely to drop out of college and more likely to maintain higher grade-point averages than are students in general. Yet there is no body of data to demonstrate that effectiveness across institutions.
This year is the first that it will be possible to build such a record. Since 2009, Ms. Harris has been collecting data through the Collegiate Recovery National Database Project. Financed by the John P. McGovern Foundation, the project began with too few participants to produce reliable data. But over time, the number of colleges with recovery programs has grown to nearly 20, with models ranging from a small counseling staff to a center for sober activities, counseling, and academic resources, and even separate housing for students.
This year, with 13 of those colleges on board, the project can finally produce enough data to be useful.
Starting on October 1, hundreds of students will submit anonymous surveys online with information on their history of addiction, health issues they’ve struggled with, legal issues, their participation in collegiate recovery programs, their coping measures, the challenges they face, and myriad other factors.
Among the participating colleges, there is already a sense that this project could be a game-changer.
“We all know that collegiate recovery is effective,” says Taylor Burke, coordinator of student-success initiatives and a recovery-program administrator at Southern Oregon University. “But in order to make it possible to apply for grants and develop some best-practice models, we really have to have the data to back up what we’re seeing.”
Crucial Questions
For counselors who are responsible for building a program, the Collegiate Recovery National Database Project may finally produce empirical answers to questions that have plagued them: How can programs reach the most students? Do successful recovery programs share key components? What works for a Big Ten university versus a small liberal-arts college? Do students coming from local 12-step programs have different needs than those coming from expensive treatment centers? What is the overlap between students who are both in recovery and struggling with mental-health issues? What is the average length of time most recovering students have been sober? How does that affect their needs? And what makes recovery work for some students but not for others?
Answers to those questions are critical when administrators stand in the way of new programs, which counselors say they have seen happen over and over.
“Providing a program on your campus is not bringing an undesirable element to your campus,” says Andrew J. Finch, school-counseling coordinator at Vanderbilt University. Those students “aren’t the ones who are engaging in the behaviors colleges are trying to prevent. But I still encounter quite a bit of that and hear a lot of stories about administrators thinking that’s the case.”
Vanderbilt does have a recovery program, although it is not participating in the survey.
The lack of data creates practical barriers as well. At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Jennifer Cervi, a case manager in the recovery program, began as an intern whose duty it was to design a program appropriate for Michigan.
After answering basic questions internally—How large is the need for recovery support? How robust is Ann Arbor’s chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous?—she faced the larger task of determining what that information actually meant for a fledgling program and what her initial priorities should be. With no national data set to consult, Ms. Cervi says, it took her dozens of e-mails and phone calls to piece together a patchwork of what Michigan’s program ought to look like.
Eventually she got lucky. Texas Tech’s Ms. Harris used a replication grant from the U.S. Department of Education to show Ms. Cervi her program, then fly to Michigan to walk her and Michigan administrators through the process of starting their own program.
In Need of Money
That grant has since run out, exposing another problem posed by the dearth of data: access to financing.
“We don’t know what happens if Joe Blow and John Blow both enter college in recovery, and Joe Blow goes to a school with a program, and John Blow goes where there isn’t one,” Ms. Harris says. “Does Joe stays in recovery all four years? And does John fail out the first semester because he starts drinking again? We don’t really know—but we need to know, to apply for grants.”
Ms. Harris counts seven grant applications from Texas Tech that government agencies like the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism passed over because she could not back up the value of her program with enough data. Still, she says, it’s possible that grantmakers don’t doubt the effectiveness of recovery programs. One grantmaker that rejected Texas Tech’s application later listed its recovery center as an exemplary program.
The costs of starting a program can be modest—one counselor’s salary, or administrative fees for placing recovery students in the same dormitory—but older and growing programs can have substantial operating costs, which donors are less likely to cover than flashier items, like recovery scholarships.
Some counselors point out that there is limited money for recovery studies to begin with. That is a consequence of too little research, says Teresa W. Johnston, director of Kennesaw State University’s Center for Young Adult Addiction and Recovery.
“When I got on campus four years ago, I thought, well, surely there’s money for this,” she says. “If you already have data and benchmarks and successful programs that have been funded, that’s true. But if it’s new and cutting edge, it’s almost like you don’t have the invitation to the party.”
Unlikely to produce viable grant proposals, counselor can find it hard even to get help writing good ones.
“Writing grant proposals is a skill set unto itself,” says Amy Boyd Austin, who directs the collegiate-recovery program at the University of Vermont. “Getting a university on board when you say, Can you give us one of your grant writers who may be working on another proposal? That can be a challenge.”
Jes Sellers, director of University Counseling Services at Case Western Reserve University, is one of the few counselors who doesn’t believe that more data will lead to more financing. Still, he argues that research is vital precisely because there’s no money. “We’ve been warned by officials in the White House that grant money will not be forthcoming,” he says. “Whatever we do, we have to keep an eye on efficiency and affordability.”
Money is not the only thing at stake for established collegiate recovery programs. Counselors are also hungry for data that show whom they are not serving in spite of their efforts.
On many campuses, Ms. Harris says, students in recovery overwhelmingly come from white families with the means to pay for treatment, and with representation when legal issues accompany addiction. At Kennesaw State, for example, only two of the recovery program’s 50 students are black.
And diversity does not involve only race. Mr. Sellers, at Case Western Reserve, speculates that many students who enter recovery in high school give up on the idea of attending a four-year college. His program is beginning to expand its outreach into that population, and into the LGBT population as well, a group that he says has high need but is probably underrepresented in recovery programs.
Research, most counselors believe, could push established programs to collaborate on better ways to recruit and serve a more diverse cohort.
“So few people understand how important it is for us to have research,” says Ms. Harris, “but it’s the only way for programs like these to spread.” That’s crucial, she explains, because Texas Tech can handle only about 80 students in its program each year. “This is big. We have a chance to save so many of these kids that could be lost.”
