As The Chronicle recently reported, a number of institutions have added the topic of student mental health to an already-crowded orientation schedule, using speakers, videos, skits, and an online course to educate students about their own, and one another’s, mental-health issues and available resources. Mental-health concerns (recognizing symptoms, knowing how to get help, etc.) are sharing the lineup with alcohol policies, sexual-assault awareness, library resources, and roommate relations, not to mention the student-organization carnival and numerous barbecues, pizza dinners, and ice-cream socials. It is a worthy effort, but orientation week is not enough, and it’s definitely not soon enough.
It’s hard to argue that mental health is not worth an hour of the packed schedule typical of an orientation week or weekend. Students’ mental health affects retention, academic performance, and community morale, and counseling centers are struggling to keep up with the need. According to an annual survey conducted by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, over a third of those centers have waiting lists.
I have two concerns with the orientation strategy. One is that students in that setting do not absorb information quite the way we’re hoping they will. I say that as someone who has planned, participated in, and evaluated orientation sessions on a number of campuses. We hope they will absorb it at a high enough level to make a difference when they need to recall it (for example, when they need mental-health services).
The reality is that students probably absorb only about 25 percent of the information shared by the parade of sessions and speakers. While they are trying or pretending to listen to the police chief, the academic adviser, the sexual-assault response coordinator, the director of food services, the intramurals coordinator, the career services and work-study directors, and — I’m loath to admit, since it was my role — the dean of students, they are actually 1) too exhausted by the emotional stress and sleeplessness of the previous few days to pay attention and 2) much more interested in one another or their phones, on which they are texting parents or friends back home.
The truth, as any orientation director will tell you, is that even very good orientation programs are receptacles for all those worthy initiatives on campus that hope to get vital information delivered to students as effectively and efficiently as possible. The other truth, as that same orientation director will tell you, is that standing in front of them, or doing skits, or showing videos during these frenzied few days is not the way to do that. This was the genesis, on many campuses, of the “extended orientation” or College 101 experience — to provide a more sensible pace for imparting critical, success-making knowledge.
And the bigger, more overwhelming issue is this: The first day of a student’s orientation is too late to be discussing student mental health for the first time. In most cases, by the time a new student in crisis is sitting in front of a dean of students who is trying hard to untangle what is going on, the student’s relationship with the institution is actually already a year old. It began as early as the student’s first thoughts about applying, continued through emails, open houses, phone calls from alums, overnight visits, and negotiations over financial-aid packages.
It is during this dance of invitation and acceptance that the first discussions of student mental health and campus services should happen. The increase in the number of students coming to college already diagnosed with significant mental-health challenges, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and substance-abuse histories, is well documented by professional organizations, researchers, and the popular media.
Unfortunately, we do not talk about these issues in the year leading up to a student’s arrival on campus. Instead, we tend to provide the most generic information about services to students and families, assuring them of the competence of our counselors, the availability of support, whatever it might take to keep them interested in us. And in fairness to the very ethical and committed admissions professionals I’ve worked with over the years, families and students don’t share much themselves, afraid that they may lose this chance at admission to their dream institution. Or they just might not know what they should ask.
It is only when the student arrives that the severity of their mental-health challenge becomes fully known to the campus, and even then it may surface only when the student is in crisis. Would having heard in more detail during orientation about available services have made a difference? I doubt it. What would make a difference is for conversations about what a student truly needs and what a college can reasonably offer to happen as part of the admissions process. Colleges must convince families that sharing such vital information will not lessen their student’s chance of admission, and it may well increase their student’s chance of success.
As advocates and organizations such as Active Minds, a campus-based group that supports students with mental illness, encourage these students to come out of the shadow of shame that mental- and emotional-health disorders can cast, it is incumbent upon colleges to introduce their services as early as possible and begin a dialogue with families about whether such services will be enough. An honest conversation between an admissions counselor and a prospective student and family, or between a counseling-center director and an admitted student and family, will make more of a difference in that student’s chances of success than any orientation program ever could.
