College Counseling and Mental Health

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

The key to all counseling—personal, academic, career, mental health, college—lies in one goal:  To give the client something new to think about.

Consider that for just a moment.  

A client comes into our office with a given set of rules and ideas about how the world works.  Since they haven’t come in for a social call, it’s clear they want those rules and ideas to do something else than what they’re now doing.  They want them to make more sense.  To open up more possibilities.  To bring them more peace.

How do you know this has occurred?  You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice, watch it in their step.  No, they probably haven’t overcome whatever it is that brought them in.  But they’re leaving with a new plan for what the next step is, and what it could lead to.  That’s not just hope; that’s strategic hope.  That’s counseling.

I thought about this when I read about a new survey of high school counselors showing more time is being spent on mental health counseling, and less on college counseling.  The survey suggests students feel the cost of college is a big factor in keeping them away from thinking about that option, followed by uncertainty about their career interests.  Apparently the thinking behind this last factoid is, why go to college unless you know what you want to be when you grow up?

These data points should be discouraging to the profession for a number of reasons:

• The shift is much more significant in public schools than private schools.  Over 60 percent of public school counselors report a downtick in college counseling, compared to 18 percent in private schools.  If we accept the long-standing premise that private school parents tend to be more involved in their child’s education, that would suggest public school students are shutting out college before they don’t really know what they’re saying no to.

• That’s clearly true with the issue of not going to college because they are unsure about career options.  Going to college used to be a vital step in the process of career exploration, and many (most) colleges are designed to give students two years to try out new paths and personas before settling on a major.  Why are students assuming otherwise?

• It’s certainly true that the colleges that get all the media attention cost too much—on average, over $43,000-- and, once again, that’s all the more reason for the media to create a more balanced approach to covering postsecondary options.  In Michigan, most students can go to the first two years of college for free, and in Detroit, most can go to four years of college for free.  Otherwise, a year of public college will run you a little over $11,000, and that’s before financial aid.  Not exactly a car payment, but manageable, with some advanced planning—planning public school counselors can, and should, be giving families in sixth grade.

• The report is a reminder of the sad level of training most public school counselors get in college counseling.  College counseling and mental health counseling aren’t either-or propositions—in fact, tell a mentally distressed student college is a fresh start, and watch their eyes light up.  But we aren’t trained that way; college counseling is an add-on about getting into Harvard, not something every student deserves to understand.

Until the media, and counselor training programs themselves, stop selling college as an elite activity, too many students will make choices they don’t understand, and that is a disservice to them, their families, and our society.