Breanda Dean, Jared A. Durtshi, Suzanne Floyd, Christopher T. Silva, and Momoko Yamashita with Dr. Tim Smith
Traditionally, university counseling centers provide academic and psychological services to students in need of assistance. However, professionals in counseling centers have become increasingly aware of changes in higher education in general and in students’ presenting problems in particular, with a notable trend toward increasing severity and chronicity of mental health concerns. These trends, together with diminishing university fiscal support for student services, have created significant challenges for college counseling centers (American College Personnel Association, 1990; Bishop, 1990; Dworkin & Lyddon, 1991). These national trends were emphasized fifteen years ago (Stone & Archer, 1990), but the field could now benefit from an updated overview of counseling center practices, workloads, concerns, etc., as well as from a synthesis of proposed solutions for the challenges. Therefore, the overall purposes of this study was to examine the attitudes of counselors toward issues facing the college counseling profession and to gather information about their current work experiences in college counseling centers. The study involved descriptive research using a survey designed to gather general information.
Participants were 117 members from the American College Counseling Association. Participants responded to a mailed questionnaire sent to 450 individuals randomly selected from the ACCA membership directory. Potential participants were also sent an email reminder a few days after the mailing. The return rate was 26%.Returned surveys were type written and analyzed via qualitative content analysis.
Based on an initial reading of the survey response questions, tentative content categories were developed. The categories were organized in a table and defined. After going through several responses, the categories were reformulated and changed as needed to more accurately reflect the meaning of the content in the responses. This refining process of category reformulation was repeated several times in order to avoid inconsistencies and discrepancies. The categorized material was verified by a second coder who a) looked to verify the categories as conceptually meaningful and distinct yet not too broad, b) looked for additional meaning in response that was not yet covered by an existing category, and c) verified that the coding performed was accurate. A third verification was done by the faculty mentor Dr. Tim Smith. The following paragraphs detail the responses received for each question.
Feedback received for improving ACCA’s Journal of College Counseling was heavily weighted by one primary response. Many respondents suggested including more practical articles that integrated theory and techniques. They want to see more real-life solutions that are applicable and work in a common counseling center. Others suggested that the journal emphasize the importance of counseling as a valuable resource, address the important role that counseling has on retention, and a couple of people suggest
more issues of the journal per year.
In answer to the question of how their counseling center adapts services to multicultural populations, most respondents replied with the type of programs they have incorporated. Many institutions employ the use of outreach programs, workshops, training, increased awareness seminars, etc. Other counseling centers employ a multicultural staff (including interns) or have a staff that has specific training in multicultural issues. Several replied that they work regularly with the multicultural office at the school, and some said that there are classes available regularly on multicultural awareness.
For the question that asked about the one thing that the counselor most desired to improve about their counseling center, the most frequent answer was to increase the number of staff in the counseling center. Many others suggested improvements related to connection with other institutions, students, community. Other answers included the need for more financial support, improvement related to skills and operation of staff and people relationships inside the office, and improvement related to resources such as space, internet, psychiatry visits, policy, assessment. A few people said they would like to
have more time for actual counseling sessions.
For the question that asked about their approaches used to meet crisis/disaster mental health incidents or needs, 10 respondents said they have a special team or program that is created to meet crisis/disaster situation and 5 said they have especially trained stuff to handle the situation. Another 15 said that preliminary steps have been taken but nothing formal has been developed. Nine said there is nothing is in place to handle this kind of situation.
In conclusion, we expect that the information collected will help to inform college counselors of current issues being faced at college counseling centers around the country. Because this project was done at the request of the editor of the Journal of College Counseling, we intent to inform a national audience of our findings through publishing our results in the Journal of College Counseling.