Jay Ruderman
According to the CDC, 4 in 10 students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 2 in 10 seriously consider attempting suicide, and nearly 1 in 10 attempt suicide. The increasingly difficult proposition of affording one’s college education, heated debate over political issues, the pervasiveness of harassment and bullying on social media, and waves of bigotry such as the current surge of antisemitism on campuses are just a sampling of the various current issues that could affect students’ mental health and wellbeing.
Yet higher education institutions are falling short on delivering essential mental health resources for students. Only 29% of colleges have a counseling center that is accredited, and just 28% conduct formal wellness screenings of their students. Forty-four percent of institutions do not have a fully staffed counseling center open year-round, and 13% lack a website that consolidates information about the school’s mental health services. This is all according to survey responses from administrators at more than 250 colleges in a first-of-its kind yearlong initiative led by the Ruderman Family Foundation and The Princeton Review.
The project aims to raise awareness surrounding the shortage of resources on college campuses that promote students’ mental health and wellness, and to set a new standard for the resources which academic institutions offer in that realm. This initiative reflects the Ruderman Family Foundation’s commitment to working with our partners to help expand access to mental health services and programs in the higher education community.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, the Ruderman Family Foundation partnered with The Princeton Review to survey college administrators nationwide about the availability and extent of their mental health services and wellness resources for students. Students at more than 200 colleges and universities also participated in a survey about their school’s mental health and wellness services. The data collected in this process has been uploaded to their institutions’ profiles on The Princeton Review, and information about schools’ mental health and wellness services is also featured in the annual Best Colleges guidebook.
In a third survey cycle, The Princeton Review polled nearly 11,000 applicants and their parents on whether having information about a college’s mental health and wellness services would affect their consideration of the school.
With this information now freely accessible through these platforms, will colleges and universities be motivated to act? They should be, if they are looking to meet applicants’ needs. In the project’s survey of applicants and their parents, 89% of respondents said a college’s health, mental health, and wellness services would affect their application and enrollment decisions. Within that group, 53% indicated they would be “strongly” or “very” interested in having such information about schools they were considering. This project was launched precisely for that reason — to empower applicants with everything they need to make more informed decisions on where to enroll, with access to mental health resources as a central factor in their process.
Simultaneously, there is growing hope provided by a group of institutions that are demonstrating a particularly exceptional commitment to students’ mental health. These are the 16 schools in the inaugural Campus Mental Health Honor Roll. We worked with an advisory board of professionals with experience in student mental health to set the criteria for the selections. Based on data collected from our surveys, the criteria for making the honor roll looked at whether students have a campus quality of life that is both healthy and attentive to their overall wellbeing; how well a school is empowering its students to address their own mental health through education programs and peer-to-peer offerings; and the overall administrative support for campus mental health and wellbeing through its policies, including commitments to staffing and student support.
Paying close attention to the institutions listed in the mental health honor roll enables prospective students who prioritize mental health to get a keen sense of which campuses offer the strongest resources and programs that will meet their needs. And yet, the honor roll schools represent only a small sampling of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. As the survey found, exemplary access to the full range of mental health services that students need is hardly a given.
In an era when prospective students and their families are becoming more aware of alarming gaps in schools’ attention to students’ wellbeing, higher education institutions should have plenty of incentive to take long-overdue steps of expanding access to mental health resources and services. This motivation for institutions is two-fold. First, increasingly prioritizing students’ mental health is likely to boost their enrollment figures. Second, campuses that enhance their mental health offerings can fulfill their roles as safe spaces where today’s students can grow and flourish academically and socially.
As applicants become more informed about their decisions, it is time for colleges and universities to increase budget allocations for counseling services, implement wellness screenings, foster a culture that destigmatizes seeking mental health support, and take other steps that give more consideration to students’ mental health. It is our aspiration that many more institutions of higher education in the U.S. will participate in similar survey research exposing the issue further in the future, will help to raise crucial awareness about gaps in mental health and wellness resources, and commit to expanding access to those resources on their campuses.
Jay Ruderman is President of the Ruderman Family Foundation.
