College Counseling Today: Contemporary Students and How Counseling Centers Meet Their Needs

There is evidence that today’s college and university students are struggling with emotional and behavioral health problems at higher rates than in past generations. This article explores the various ways, utilizing a range of models, that college and university counseling centers have mobilized to respond to these challenges. We examine literature about the characteristics and concerns of the current student generation along with what counseling centers are doing to respond to the challenge of student needs. We describe a survey (N = 408) of members of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) and American College Counseling Association (ACCA) that elicited the kinds of services, functions, structures, and organizational relationships found in today’s counseling centers. In addition to confirming the core mission of providing counseling and psychotherapy, the survey revealed widespread counseling center collaboration and consultation activities beyond the counseling room. The survey also indicated a variety of administrative and structural arrangements in the way counseling centers are placed on their individual campuses. Finally, we suggest a framework for planning, executing, and evaluating counseling center and campus initiatives.     

Chapter 2.

Abstract

In 2002, the first in a series of working conferences was held as a collaboration between the counseling service of Bennington College and the Austen Riggs Center's Erikson Institute. The title of the first conference was The Escalating Use of Medications by College Students: What Are They Telling Us, What Are We Telling Them?. It was meant to provide a space to explore the meaning and context of this phenomenon. The primary contexts examined were the student's familial/ cultural context and then the institutional context from which the counseling staff was attempting to respond to the student. This paper describes that initial conference and the emergent themes over the next few years.     

Another Voice:

The college psychotherapy service presents an opportunity and a dnager for a psychotherapist to speak in several "distinguishable voices." When a student comes to the psychotherapy service in crisis and feelings of helplessness, we respond with professionally trained empathy and care. Recalling Dr. Gerald Caplan's "Principles of Preventive Psychiatry," we must be sure to emphasize the voice of primary prevention through health education and programs for high risk groups.     

Chapter 7: Fostering Development

Summary

This chapter reports a case of college student psychotherapy involving short 1doses” of counseling over the course of a student's four-year college career. During treatment, the student addressed and increasingly came to terms with issues involving relationships with his family, friends, and love interests. By his own report, he gained considerably from this experience.     

Toward Developing a Behavioral Counselor Education Model

Counselor education currently does not have a training model that is systematically employed and contains provisions for individual differences or promotes the development of programs for facilitating transfer of training. In the proposed model, counselor educators must decide which of the counseling student's thinking, feeling, and acting behaviors will become the focus of training efforts. The staff creatively implements its conceptualized behavioral curriculum goals through the application of learning principles to specified counseling student behaviors that are assessed to determine if whether or not the desired behavior changes are occurring.     

Roles,Tasks and Boundaries:

This commentary on Robert May's paper points to his varying uses of the term "voices." At times, he speaks of the conflict of "voices" within the individual. At other times, he speaks of the conflict of "voices" within the institution. And still further, he seems to be referring to the difference in "voices" connected with different professional identifications. Keeping the focus exclusively on the conflict of "voices" within the individual, this paper will also address issues similar to those raised by May. From this author's perspective, May appears to establish the "psychotherapeutic voice" as the ideal from which we inevitably, and unfortunately, must depart. Preferring the term "roles" to "voices," I attempt to question the psychotherapeutic ideal, and suggest that we in "college mental health" work harder at defining our multiple roles and tasks so that activities outside of the psychotherapeutic are not felt as threats to or betrayals of our basic ideals.     

“Areas of Instruction”—A Tool for Assessing the Quality of Instructional Situations

A model for analysing the nature of the dyadic teacher–student interplay in instructional situations including one teacher and one student is described. The “teacher” may be a regular teacher, a parent, or any other person who is in the position of teacher. The “student” may be a student of any age. The model may discern (a) if the teacher merely asks for information preknown to the teacher and the teacher evaluates the student's answer according to the teacher's preknowledge, (b) if the teacher asks for information preknown to the teacher, the teacher then scaffolds the student's learning by giving clues to the correct answer and then evaluates the answer according to the teacher's preknowledge, or (c) the teacher asks for information not preknown to her/him and the teacher is genuinely interested in the student's answer. This last scenario (c) is thought to give optimal conditions for cognitive development for the student.     

The Staffing Conference: An Approach to Student Evaluation

In an attempt to confront the problem of student evaluation, the staffing conference was developed as a quality control mechanism to monitor the student's progress through the program. This article describes the structure and process of the staffing conference and discusses some of the resulting benefits that have accrued to staff, students, and the counseling program as a whole.     

Ova and out: Using twins to estimate the educational returns to attending a selective college

Research has shown that attending a relatively selective four-year college over a less selective alternative is positively related to bachelor's degree completion. This paper revisits that question with a novel dataset of over 11,000 sets of twins in the United States and information on colleges to which they apply, enroll, and potentially graduate. I show that a student's probability of bachelor's degree completion within four years increases by 5 percentage points by choosing an institution with a median SAT score 100 points higher than the alternative. Moreover, the estimated magnitude of impact is insensitive to several methodologies, including OLS, twin fixed effects, and controlling for the application portfolio. This suggests that in certain contexts, sources of bias perceived as barriers to obtaining causal estimates of the returns to college selectivity, such as unobserved family characteristics and student aspiration, may be of little concern.     

Academically Successful Students with Serious Mental Health Difficulties: A Psychodynamic Developmental Perspective

Abstract

This commentary discusses Robert May's reflections on policy for student mental health services on college and university campuses. The Report of the Harvard Provost's Committee on Student Mental Health Services is the impetus for his reflections. While May suggests that the student mental health unit be taken out of the medical unit, the Committee recommends that the variety of services be maintained, but out of the grip of managed care, and that there be greater collaboration and coordination among the services. While noting the psychiatric orientation of both the Committee and its Report, this author sees that the Report emphasizes the institutional context for students' emotional problems and the neglect of that context by recent Harvard University Health Services policies. The present author urges better collaboration between the services located in counseling services and those located in medical services.     

Student Constructions of Fit: Narratives About Incongruence at a Faith-Based University

Decades of student persistence and retention literature has brought to light factors of social, academic, and religious fit that influence a student's decision to remain at or depart from an institution. At Christian institutions, increasing student pluralism raises the likelihood that students will not fit religiously. This qualitative study of 21 first-time, full-time students contributes to the existing literature by exploring how students who already feel they do not fit for religious reasons work at constructing a sense of fit at a Christian research university. Many participants coped with religious discontinuity by redefining specifically Christian practices and teachings in terms that were personally palatable: as either general moral lessons that would help them to be a better person or as cultural insights that would benefit them social and professionally in the future. In many cases, university staff were instrumental. Finally, participants worked to construct an acceptable level of fit, or fit threshold, through various combinations of social fit, academic fit, and religious fit, often compensating for one with others. As Christian institutions increasingly invite students from diverse religious backgrounds into their campus community, understanding ways that these students attempt to adapt to religious incongruence will be paramount.     

Teachers’ academic appraisals and referral decisions: The effect of sharing health information when diabetes is present

Two prior studies showed that giving teachers more information about a student's illness led them to make better attributions about that student's classroom problems and better classroom accommodations. In this study, 235 teachers appraised academic competence and judged whether to seek help or make a referral for a hypothetical student with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Teachers received one of five levels comprising increasing disease disclosure and classroom‐relevant information about T1DM. Contrary to prior studies, teachers in this study who were given a student's T1DM diagnosis and details about T1DM's classroom risks failed to make better judgments about the student's academic skill levels or to award more accurate grades. Instead, teachers seemed swayed by this student's apparently careless and inconsistent schoolwork, which was presumably disease related. Likewise, better‐informed teachers were no better at selecting accommodations. However, once it was disclosed that the hypothetical student had T1DM, most teachers seemed knowledgeable about the most appropriate potential Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act category for service delivery. Regarding practice issues, school psychologists were rarely selected as a first choice for consultation, and the more information teachers were provided with about T1DM and the student's disease status, the less likely they were to select a school psychologist as a consultant.     

Student learning and an independent study course

An evaluation of an Open University course being used in a conventional university revealed a number of complex and interrelated issues relating to student learning. This paper considers some problems in researching this area and focusses on four main themes: the relationship of the student's choice of learning strategy with the requirements of the learning task (in this case a textually based independent study course); the ability of the student to adapt his learning strategy to fit the requirements of the course; the restrictions the task imposes on the possible learning strategies that can be employed; the student's view of learning and knowledge. The paper explores the interplay of these factors, with particular reference to the Open University course being studied.     

Recruiting,Redefining, and Recommitting: The Quest to Increase Socioeconomic Diversity at Amherst College

While many selective and moderately selective schools have attempted to increase the numbers of low-income students and students of color in their student body, few have successfully done so. In this qualitative case study, I examine the efforts of an elite, private, liberal arts school, Amherst College, as it increased the socioeconomic diversity of its student body, and I highlight the College's comparative success in this endeavor. Using Bourdieu's social reproduction theory as an analytic frame, I argue that Amherst's success is a result of its historic commitment to diversity and equality as well as its contemporary initiatives and the combination of multiple efforts that transcend simple rhetoric. These initiatives include widening the applicant pool by intensifying recruitment efforts and broadening definitions of merit, hiring a dynamic president as the voice and leader of the diversity movement, and garnering widespread institutional support. This article also includes a survey of the status of low-income students and students of color in the nation's colleges and universities over time and a brief history of diversity trends in higher education since World War II.     

The Transition Services Checklist

A coordinated set of activities for a student, designed within an outcome oriented process, which promotes movement from school to post-school activities, post-secondary education, vocational training, integrated employment (including supported employment), continuing and adult education, adult services, independent living, or community participation. The coordinated set of activities shall be based upon the individual student's needs, taking into account the student's preferences and interests, and shall include instruction, community experiences, the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives, and when appropriate, acquisition of daily living skills and functional vocational evaluation. (IDEA, 20 U.S.C. 1401 [a] [19]).     

What Students Don't Tell Their Parents:

This article deals with the usually unverbalized aspects of a college student's emotional life, and how this affects communication with parents. During college the student essentially recreates her or himself. College students find themselves in a "Largely unrecognized turmoil," confronted with new rules for interaction, new lifestyles, and a lack of familiar structure. This leads to a great deal of self-evaluation, comparing previous structures (from the home and high school) with new ideas. Within these circumstances of uncertainty, questioning, and experimentation, the student is particularly vulnerable and greatly wishes for strong expressions of parental support. The issue of communication with parents is clouded by the student's wish for the parents to see her or him as adult and "together"; therefore, the student will rarely express the need for support. If parents are more aware of the student's unverbalized circumstances, as well as appreciative of what they themselves can gain from the changes their daughter or son experiences, both student and parent will feel more at ease and can grow personally. The article suggests certain guidelines for communication between parents and students.     

Facial micro-expression states as an indicator for conceptual change in students' understanding of air pressure and boiling points

Utilizing facial recognition technology, the current study has attempted to predict the likelihood of student conceptual change with decision tree models based on the facial micro-expression states (FMES) students exhibited when they experience conceptual conflict. While conceptual change through conceptual conflicts in science education is a well-studied field, there is little research done on conceptual change through conceptual conflict in terms of students' facial expressions. As facial expressions are one of the most direct and immediate responses one can get during instruction and that facial expressions are often representations student's emotions, a link between students' FMES and learning was explored. Facial data was collected from 90 tenth graders. Only data from the 72 students who made incorrect predictions were analyzed in this study. The concept taught was the relationship between boiling point and air pressure. Through facial recognition software analysis and decision tree models, the current study found Surprised, Sad and Disgusted to be key FMES that could be used to predict student conceptual change in a conceptual conflict-based scenario.     

We've got minorities,yes we do: visual representations of racial and ethnic diversity in college recruitment materials

Colleges and universities have expanded their use of the internet and social media in marketing strategies, but the direct mailing of admissions brochures continues to be at the heart of recruitment efforts. Because admissions brochures often serve as a potential student's introduction to the campus, they are carefully crafted to provide a specific impression of the institution. This study examined one aspect of the marketing of colleges by examining the portrayal of racial and ethnic diversity. Through a content analysis of over 10,000 photographs from 165 four-year institutions in the US, the accuracy of the photographic portrayal of diversity in recruitment materials was assessed. Findings indicate that the majority of institutions provided images of diversity to prospective students in 2011 that were significantly different than the actual student body. Furthermore, diversity was typically symbolized by portraying African American students at higher rates rather than presenting a more representative student body.