Up Against the Ivy Wall in 2004

Campus counseling centers help kids cope with acclimating to their new competitive environment. But the rising demand for clinical services by a new "psychologically diverse" student body is hitting a wall of finite, if not shrinking, resources.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on March 01, 2004 - last reviewed on September 14, 2006

Schools are struggling to find the right mix of educational, residential and therapeutic solutions. Catching students one by one in counseling will never suffice. Says Hyman: "Once a week all year is not financially viable, nor is it the right approach to depression, which responds to time-limited cognitive-based therapy."

Colleges are forced to maximize the resources they do have. On many campuses, academic faculty, athletic staff and residence advisors are now front-line defense and get basic training in behavioral warning signs—say, a student hasn't been seen in two days. They take seriously conversations overheard in locker rooms and bathrooms in the hopes of identifying students who might be self-injurious. It takes an effort to coax them out of their separate silos but an across-university case-conference approach to individual students is taking hold.

The problems now taxing resources may be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Students themselves point to an underground of anguish. "In the atmosphere that is established at a competitive university," says one student—a graduate of one competitive university now a master's candidate at another— "it is often difficult to express personal vulnerability." Indeed, observes the former peer counselor, "many students see others effortlessly finding success and happiness at college. They feel they're the only ones who are unhappy. The dorm community of a competitive university is not a ‘safe' place to expose personal weaknesses." The climate is too adversarial. Students go to great lengths to keep their problems private. "They suffer in silence."

Still, not everyone's sure that the new student is a more disturbed person than in past generations. "If you think about the etiology of the concerns students bring to us, the first thing that strikes you is they are 18," says Ted W. Grace, M.D., head of the student health service at Ohio State. He cites the experience of his own daughter. As a freshman, she encountered "the usual problems of adolescence such as loneliness and independence," and developed panic attacks.

"Late adolescents represent a unique subpopulation in transition between youth and adulthood marked by new-found freedoms, participation in high-risk behaviors and exposure to many stressors such as examinations, public speaking, interpersonal relationships and transition from structured home environments to independent living conditions."

His daughter was given an SSRI. Was she being treated for disease, Grace asks, or "being temporarily helped through a difficult transitional period before her avoidance behaviors had an opportunity to become established?" Such "pharmaceutical support to help ease them through adolescence" is producing "an increasing number of students being more successful than ever before."