The Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) and the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) share and collaborate on data regarding counseling center trends. This blog, the first featuring our partnership, focuses on counseling center staff turnover. As part of the annual renewal process, CCMH requested turnover data from its member centers in Summer 2022 while AUCCCD requested turnover and recruitment data from its membership during the Fall of 2022. The data reflects information from the 2021-2022 academic year.

The Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) 2022 Annual Report highlighted that Social Anxiety is the area of distress that demonstrated the largest 12-year increase among students seeking services at college counseling centers nationally. Social anxiety has been found to be prominent among college students and linked to mental health problems later in life (Purdon et al., 2001; Schry et al., 2012). Clients with higher social anxiety symptoms utilize more UCC services (Kilcullen et al., 2021; Janis, 2017) and experience stigmatization (Anderson et al., 2015). Thus, it is important to better understand current trends in social anxiety for students seeking college counseling services to provide clinicians and institutions with nuanced information that may inform care and programs. In the current blog, we further explored the trends in social anxiety, including information from clinicians’ assessments, as well as co-occurring problems that are associated with social anxiety. Specifically, the following questions were answered:

In recent years, there has been increased attention on discrimination and its negative effects on well-being, including both physical and mental health. Students on university and college campuses are not immune from experiencing discrimination. According to data from the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), 7.9% of students experienced discrimination, and this rate is even higher in students who identify with minority identities.

2022 Annual Report