Student mental health remains one of the most pressing—and complex—challenges facing higher education today.
Katie Hurley, vice president of community initiatives at The Jed Foundation (JED), joins Inside Higher Ed student success reporter Joshua Bay in his inaugural episode of Voices of Student Success to discuss the state of student mental health—what’s changed, what campuses are facing and where institutions may be falling short.
This episode is the first of a four-part series on mental health; the following three episodes will explore student loneliness, institutional responsibility and how AI is reshaping conversations around student support.
Hurley delves into the state of student mental health on college campuses, including what’s driving increased demand for support, how counseling centers are adapting under strain and why student experiences vary so widely across different contexts and identities. She also examines where institutions continue to face challenges—and what a more comprehensive approach to campus mental health could look like.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: I want to start really broadly—because I think there are a lot of assumptions about how we talk about student mental health right now. When you step back, what feels most misunderstood—and what are people in higher ed still underestimating?
A: One thing that happens is that we look at data that comes out from Healthy Minds [survey] and other sources, which is really great because it helps give us sort of a blueprint of where things are and where we might potentially be able to help. But we forget the nuance beneath the data. When we’re looking at survey data, it’s really a snapshot in time—when students answered very specific questions on a survey. And day to day, students are dealing with a lot of different things. One day might be great—they might have plans with friends, be on top of their assignments, feel hopeful about a summer internship. They might have a really good day, with a lot of hope and good things happening. And then another day, they might feel completely underwater with their assignments. They’re trying to manage volunteering, homework, really difficult classes and questions like: What is my future going to look like? Do I have enough money to pay for this?
A lot of students are either taking on very large loans or paying some portion as they go. We have a lot of working students right now. We have students who are caring for a small child while going through school to get their degrees. So there’s just so much nuance beneath the statistics, and we forget that on any given day, students could be up against any number of barriers—and that’s just really hard.
Q: You hear a lot of language like “crisis” or “overwhelmed” when people talk about counseling centers—but I’m curious what that actually looks like on the ground. What does that signal about the system itself, and what’s actually breaking down beneath that pressure?
A: “Crisis” has taken on a lot of meanings, and this is one of those areas where we know more—but some things have been watered down and sort of shape-shifted along the way. We have to think about whether we’re actually talking about a specific mental health crisis—where someone is considering self-harm, feeling suicidal or unable to get out of bed and go to class and missing all the things they would normally do.
What this looks like on the ground really depends on the campus. Some very large campuses can have very long wait lists [for counseling services]. In those cases, they often partner with a telehealth app—many are using TimelyCare, but there are others as well—so that students can have immediate access if they’re not in an acute crisis. A student might go into the counseling center, get assessed and then be referred. Some campuses are able to provide six sessions on campus, and then they have to refer out. Campuses have all different ways of handling the need right now—and the need is great for a variety of reasons.
Capacity is often low in counseling centers, so they’re getting really creative and innovative in how they meet that need—offering group spaces, bringing therapy dogs onto campus. They’re doing all kinds of things from a preventive lens to try to engage with students and get eyes on them. But at a school with, say, 40,000 students, it’s entirely possible that the wait list is long and they may need to call in emergency services or a nearby hospital to handle a crisis. It really depends on where they are and what resources they have.
Q: That raises a bigger question about where the pressure points really sit. When institutions fall short in supporting student mental health, what’s usually the real reason—not the stated one?
A: Just having enough people in the counseling center with enough time. There are only so many hours in a day that therapy can be provided. I think a lot of institutions are doing their best to build out those counseling centers, but do they have the funding for it? Is there enough money in the budget to bring on more therapists, more licensed clinicians, Ph.D.s and all the different combinations of people they need in campus centers like that? So I think that can be a large barrier.
And then, sometimes, it depends on the setting. Are you in a rural area? An urban area? Are you in a place where mental health is talked about openly or one where there’s still a lot of stigma? Because sometimes it comes down to trust. Sometimes young people prefer to go to friends, family or faith leaders. So there are all kinds of reasons why young people might not be using the services that are there, and there are also institutional reasons why schools may not have the capacity to serve every single student.
Q: And of course, this doesn’t look the same for every student. How are mental health needs showing up differently across student groups—and where are support systems still not designed for those differences?
A: We do know from the most recent Healthy Minds data that mental health needs among Black and Latino students have increased in the last four years. Those are communities that higher ed should really be paying attention to and engaging with. The only way to build resources that work for communities is to speak to the communities themselves. We can’t make assumptions about what students need—we need student voice in that process.
But [people don’t understand] that in many areas food insecurity is a huge problem for many students across different communities—including the ones you mentioned, but not only those communities. Right now, the price of gas and getting to and from school is difficult for commuter students. That’s something that isn’t being talked about enough when we discuss these broader cost pressures.
So you have food, transportation, juggling competing demands, caring for an adult or a child and having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet and pay for classes. There are all kinds of barriers that students—particularly first-generation students—are trying to overcome. There’s also this idea of, “Let’s all be grateful that this opportunity is available,” and I think that can feel like a barrier for students who are thinking, “I’m doing everything possible to make this happen. It’s not that I’m not grateful—I’m just really tired.”
So there can be an expectation that students should be exceptionally resilient instead of allowing for an average level of resilience. We need to make accommodations for students who are dealing with a lot and support them through it—rather than saying, “You’re here now, good for you, now you have to do what’s expected.”
Q: Under the Trump administration, DEI has been very much under attack. How do you see this impacting the needs of Black, Latino, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized students?
A: What we know is that identity-affirming spaces are a protective factor for mental health. So if those spaces are being removed from campuses, then we’re removing a major protective factor that can really help students—because they have a group of people they can talk to. A lot of young people don’t necessarily turn to formal therapy; they talk in groups. This is particularly true among young Black male students, who may talk with their peers in these spaces where they feel safe and not under scrutiny. But if you take that away, you’ve taken away a safety space for an entire group of people on campus.
I do think these spaces continue on many campuses, [even if] students are creating them on their own. LGBTQ+ groups are another example—taking formal spaces and making them their own somewhere on campus. Young people are not willing to have these things taken away from them, and that’s a very good thing. But the flip side is that we’re taking away from their cognitive capacity by forcing them to meet all of their own needs all the time. And that’s a dangerous precedent to set for people’s mental health.
Q: One group that often gets pulled into this in a really complicated way is faculty. We tend to position them as first responders—but what are we realistically asking of them that they’re not trained or supported to do?
A: Too much—we’re asking a lot of faculty right now. We’re asking them to assess young people, essentially evaluating their mental health on the fly, whether in a classroom or over Zoom, which in many cases is very difficult to do. I’m a trained clinician, I’ve been doing this for 28 years, and I still prefer to do it in person rather than over Zoom. We’re asking them to intervene. We’re asking them to provide resources.
But we also have to recognize that in the field of mental health, I have a group of colleagues I can debrief with when it’s been a long week. I can reach out to them anytime. Faculty don’t necessarily have that. So if we’re going to task them with being mental health first responders, we have to build in systems of support for them—spaces where they can debrief, where they know who they can talk to—because this work affects their mental health as well. And I’m not sure that’s being adequately explored, both from a research perspective and in real time on college campuses.
Q: Given everything we’ve talked about, what gives you the most hope right now—and what still keeps you up at night?
A: I will say, I have a lot of hope—and I know that sounds strange in a time where report after report uses words like “crisis.” But I have a lot of hope because this generation of college students is very motivated. They’re better self-advocates than we’ve seen in the past. They are willing to talk about mental health. Sometimes they use their own language, and that’s OK—every generation has had its own language. You see these memes talking about how Gen Z talks and older people don’t understand it, but we all had it. Gen X had their words as well. I have heard so many stories from college students about helping someone get to the counseling center, or helping them use a telehealth app to do a check-in with somebody, or to text the crisis text line. So they’re doing it.
But what keeps me up at night is that I don’t want them to feel like they have to do it alone. Where can we provide support for everybody so that the campus is working together to improve mental health all the way through? When campuses do this well, students see that they don’t have to do it all alone—that they can walk their friend over to the counseling center and say, “We need help.”
So that’s what gives me hope: that students are open to it in many, many places. Of course, there are some areas in the United States where stigma is still going to be an issue. But these young people are so connected online, and we only talk about the negatives. What we don’t talk about is that they are talking to each other online about mental health, about bullying, about all kinds of things—and they’re helping each other through it. They’re connecting from all over the country through a connection that’s like six steps away. A kid in California can help a kid in Alabama through a crisis and encourage them to use the crisis text line. And that’s a really good thing. So sometimes we have to think about the positives in the things that also make us nervous.
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