For Chase Taylor, and millions of other college students who have been touched by mental illness, the issue of access to campus counseling is personal. His freshman year, a close friend at the university committed suicide.
Then, another friend, who was grieving the loss, too, told Mr. Taylor he’d had to wait weeks for a counseling appointment. Mr. Taylor, now a senior at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, got scared, and decided to investigate.
With the help of two other student representatives to the Board of Regents, he called counseling centers on all five campuses, posing as a student seeking an appointment. They set a goal of getting an appointment within two weeks, thinking they were setting a low bar. Only one campus, Crookston, could get them in.
“When you’ve seen one friend die and another’s mental health getting worse in the context of an inadequate support system, of course you feel frustrated,” Mr. Taylor said. “The dread starts to creep in at the thought of it happening twice.”
More Work to Do
Stories like Mr. Taylor’s have led to a wave of student activism at the University of Minnesota flagship, where one in three students surveyed in 2015 said they’d been diagnosed with a mental-health disorder in their lifetimes. The Minnesota Student Association, the Council of Graduate Students, and the student representatives to the Board of Regents issued statements last year urging the administration to take steps to reduce wait times and increase the diversity of the system’s mental-health staff.
The effort has yielded results. In May, the Provost’s Committee on Student Mental Health issued a report that called for more full-time employees at the flagship campus’s counseling centers and a strategy to recruit therapists from underserved populations, among other changes. The report emphasized the impact of mental health on enrollments, noting that over one-third of tuition-refund requests for 2015 were for mental-health issues. It estimated that the Twin Cities campus would lose $4.6 million in tuition revenue over four years because of such withdrawals.
In a response included in the report, the administration argued that the campus had made “significant strides toward addressing mental health issues on campus,” but acknowledged that “there remains work to do as long as some students continue to struggle with unmanaged stress and mental illness without timely access to resources.”
A month later, in June, the president and provost committed to hiring the equivalent of four and a half more counselors, in addition to two hires that were already planned for the coming year. The hires, they wrote in an email to students, “will allow us time to work more broadly with students, faculty, and administrative leaders to determine ongoing strategies and investment needs.”
Since then, the university has created a task force that is exploring how faculty members can reduce, recognize, and respond to student stress, and has begun training faculty and staff “advocates” to help students gain access to mental-health services.
The events at the University of Minnesota show how students can compel colleges to put more resources toward campus mental health. In a recent survey of campus-counseling-center directors, respondents named activism by students and parents as one of four factors driving colleges to spend more on counseling. The other drivers were crises — both actual and hypothetical; data on increasing wait times, hospitalizations, and suicide attempts; and a leadership emphasis on mental health.
Among recent pushes by students for better care were demands issued by a pair of Skidmore College students who were forced to wait for care during panic attacks. They filed an online petition this past spring urging the college to hire another full-time psychologist and create a 24-hour crisis hotline. The petition attracted more than 50,000 signatures, many from off campus. The counselor and crisis hotline are now in place.
A National Leader
At Minnesota, the administration had taken measures to reduce wait times even before the resolutions started rolling in. Between 2011 and 2015, the Twin Cities campus expanded its counseling staff by almost 40 percent, adding 9.5 full-time staff positions at the Boynton Mental Health Clinic and Student Counseling Services. The university had also hired more part-time therapists and trainees, who provide half of all care at the Student Counseling Services. And Active Minds, a campus-based group that supports students with mental illness, had just recognized the university as “one of the healthiest campuses in the nation.”
The organization commended the university’s peer-education effort and creative public-health programming, including weekly pet-therapy sessions. It praised the college for creating a provost-level committee on student mental health and for providing a 24-hour crisis hotline.
Even so, the campus still wasn’t keeping up with student demand. In 2015 the mental-health clinic began putting students on a waiting list on October 1, less than a month into the fall semester. That December, the Minnesota Student Association surveyed undergraduates and found that 30 percent had their progress toward a degree delayed by a mental-health issue.
Since the new hires were made, there has been no wait list for counseling at the Twin Cities campus, even though requests for intake appointments are up 21 percent over last year. For now, supply seems to be in line with demand.
But campus leaders aren’t expecting demand to flatten any time soon. They’re looking for ways to rearrange the counseling center to accommodate even more staff.
“We’re bulging at the seams now,” said Gary Christenson, chief medical officer at the student-health center. “You can hire more people, but you have to put them in some place. Many colleges are having that challenge.”
Student leaders say they’re pleased by the progress, but they still aren’t satisfied. Mr. Taylor wants the administration to be more proactive, to prepare for future growth and not just respond to shortages as they occur. He wants to see a systemwide strategy on mental health, campus-specific action plans, and a greater sense of urgency from the top.
“I’m grateful that the university has committed some money,” he said. “But if we were to treat this like every other physical health problem of a similar scale, we would be moving a lot faster and doing a lot more.”
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
