Counselors struggle to address a rising tide of needy students

By Virginia Myers Kelly

Counseling students through the mercurial years of college has never been easy, but recent statistics show an entirely new scale of difficulty for counselors overwhelmed by demand for their services. Over the past decade, the number of students with depression has doubled, the number of suicidal students has tripled, and sexual assaults have gone up fourfold. Almost 50 percent of college students will experience debilitating depression, half will engage in binge drinking, and one-tenth will consider suicide, according to the recently published College of the Overwhelmed: the Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It (Richard D. Kadison, Theresa Foy DiGeronimo, September 2004, Jossey-Bass).

Over the last four years, depression diagnoses have risen by 4.6 percent, according to the American College Health Association, which also reports some 50 percent of female students and 40 percent of males say they’ve been so depressed they could not function. There are also other issues such as eating disorders, panic attacks, anxiety, and behavioral diagnoses like attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). More and more students arrive at college with pockets full of prescribed psychiatric medication for ADHD and ADD, which often are managed by the counseling center.

All this comes on top of budget cuts for college staffs already stretched thin. “My staff is fried,” says Sue Thomas, director of the counseling center at the State University of New York-Potsdam and a member of United University Professions/AFT (UUP). Her office of 2.6 counselors is “severely understaffed,” with a ratio of one counselor to 1,664 students and a wait list of up to three weeks for students who need an appointment. Last year, the center had 22 psychiatric hospitalizations for suicide attempts. “Fortunately for us, all survived,” she says. “A lot of campuses are not so fortunate.”

At Potsdam, counselors are squeezing students in on overscheduled calendars just to keep up. “You’re talking to people who are thinking about killing themselves,” says Thomas. “If you’re seeing 10 of them a day, you worry that you’re going to miss something.” There have been times, she added, when wait-listed students joined the list of suicide attempts before counselors could get to them.

To cover as much as they can, Thomas and other staff provide on-call service nights and weekends—she takes weeknights and staff take weekends. They see many more anxious and depressed students than ever, and, says Thomas, “the number of students diagnosed with bipolar disorder has rocketed this year. Self-mutilation is also a growing and significant problem.”

Staffs are shrinking as need is growing

Her experience is in line with broader statistics. Nationally, 90.6 percent of college counselors say students with significant psychological disorders are a growing concern, according to the National Survey of Counseling Center Directors, conducted by Robert P. Gallagher, former vice chancellor for student affairs and former director of the counseling center at the University of Pittsburgh. The survey also shows a national ratio of students to counselors of 1,511-to-1, with 76.7 percent of directors saying they need more consulting hours. Fewer than half feel schools provide adequate education on mental health, something Thomas would like to improve at Potsdam by increasing staff and adding more prevention programs, yoga, meditation and freshman seminars for stress relief and coping. At the moment, she can’t afford much prevention at all.

“For years, we’ve been cutting the staff to the bone, and I think now we’ve cut into the bone,” says John Marino, UUP statewide vice president for professionals. Where once counselors talked about promotions, now they are less concerned with job titles and simply want help, says Marino. “They want a normal workweek, they want time to themselves.” One SUNY counseling staff was cut so that one person now covers the work of two. “He’s getting spread thinner,” says Marino. “He used to see six to eight students a day. Now he’s seeing eight to nine. He’s not on call or available to students after hours because he just can’t be on call seven days a week. Basically, they’re asking students to have a crisis during the workweek.”

College counselor Gregory Wright, Minnesota State College Faculty union/AFT-NEA, experienced a 20 percent cut in the counseling department of Rochester Community and Technical College last year—and enrollment is increasing. “We’ve had to turn people away,” says Wright, who has asked for three additional counselors. In addition, MSCF is working to further define counselor positions so that administrators will not hire lower-paid “advisers” who have a less comprehensive approach to helping students.

Wearing multiple hats

While some colleges lack counselors, others are struggling with administrative support. “The greatest shortage is in the area of support staff,” says counselor Marcie Wald, a member of the Cabrillo College Federation of Teachers/AFT in California. At Cabrillo, she says, “We are greeting, scheduling and explaining about the career center in addition to counseling. Sometimes students are simply unable to schedule because there is no one to explain the process or answer the phone.”

Community colleges like Cabrillo have an especially difficult time. In California, their student-counselor ratio is 1,900-to-1, according to the California Community College Academic Senate, whose recommended ratio is 370-to-1. Counseling at these institutions is “a combination of social work along with academic, career, personal, crisis and multicultural counseling,” says Marian Sheppard, a counselor at Sacramento City College and a member of the Los Rios College Federation of Teachers/AFT. “Universities have two systems to meet these students’ needs: a mental health system and an advising system. We do both.” Many community college students face perplexing issues such as homelessness, extreme poverty, mental illness and families fearful that college will take away family traditions. “The social work component to community college counseling is huge,” she says, “and the students’ connection with a counselor becomes the linchpin to success.”

It’s a limited success, however: Counseling at SCC is drop-in only because a caseload of 900-to-1 (by negotiated contract) prohibits appointments. The office is open weekdays only and counseling often occurs with little privacy. “The counselors tend to be more interested in getting you out of the way, so that they can move on to the next person, than they are with helping you to succeed academically,” wrote one frustrated student who waited 40 minutes for a counselor to tell him to return later. Says Sheppard, “When good professionals are put in the position of delivering the impossible (900-to-1), you will find some very ‘bad behaviors’ and acting out by those professionals. There is no question that we are stretched beyond the limit of reasonable job expectations.”

Susan Shumejda, an associate professor/counselor at Westchester (N.Y.) Community College and a member of the WCC Federation of Teachers/AFT, has used community resources to address her department’s limitations. Most mental health cases are referred off campus. “The college is very blessed because in Westchester County there is a good network for referral,” she says, but she would like to see a clinical presence on campus as well. With tight budgets, however, her office can only put “a finger in the dike.”

Patrick Butler, a San Jose Evergreen Faculty Association/AFT officer, is equally pressed. His department at San Jose City College has been sliced in half, from nine to four counselors, since 1990, but demand has not diminished. The student-counselor ratio is 2,000-to-1 and counselors are rushing through sessions to try to cover everyone. “It’s life decisions in five minutes,” says Butler. “It makes me feel like a medic working in a battlefield. Everybody’s under a lot of stress.” The union, he says, is working hard to negotiate an increase in the number of counselors, and the academic senate passed a resolution calling the situation “desperate.”

Help is on the Web

One possible solution has been the use of Web sites for students to access general information about mental health issues common among their age group. Although some counselors are wary of relying too heavily on Internet resources, many feel that, when combined with access to live counseling, the general information they disseminate can reach students when counselors cannot. And, because of the Web’s anonymity, online resources may even encourage reluctant students to seek help.

Sites like campusblues.com and ulifeline.org tailor their sites to specific schools, so students can reach their own counseling centers as well as find guidance on whether they have ADD or how to leave an abusive relationship, for example.

These kinds of stopgap measures can be seen elsewhere on college campuses, says Marino, at SUNY. “It’s not just counselors,” he says. “It’s almost every field that we’re involved in. It’s ‘do more with less.’” When staff members leave or retire, they often are not replaced, and that goes for the academic side as well. Classes swell, fewer full-time faculty are hired, and, says Marino, students are shortchanged.

Besides, he says, “There’s so much more in providing an education than just the classroom.” If the student in Row A is suffering from depression and cannot be seen by a counselor, he or she won’t be contributing much to the group project. If a student is binge drinking, his roommate and possibly the entire dorm will be affected.

“Counselors have very stressful and full jobs,” says Thomas, at Potsdam. “I think every counseling center in the U.S. could use more staff.”