The 2025 Annual Report summarizes data contributed to CCMH during the 2024-2025 academic year, beginning July 1, 2024 and ending on June 30, 2025. De-identified data were contributed by 209 college and university counseling centers, describing 162,187 unique college students seeking mental health treatment, 4,694 clinicians, and 1,114,255 appointments.
2025 HIGHLIGHT
The following are key findings and implications contained in this year’s report:
Financial insecurity is a critical societal problem that has significant implications for higher education. While difficulty meeting basic needs can lead to a wide range of consequences for college students, there has been limited research thus far that has examined these impacts in a national sample of clients receiving care at counseling centers. In this year’s special section, CCMH explored the prevalence rates of various types of financial insecurity, followed by an investigation of how students with one or more financial insecurities, compared to those without, differed by employment, engagement in extracurricular activities, and psychological distress.
The findings revealed that students who were older, fifth year or higher undergraduates, or the first generation in their family to attend college disclosed considerably higher rates of financial insecurity. Additionally, financially insecure students, on average, worked more, were less involved in campus activities, and experienced higher levels of psychological distress.
These findings underscore the importance of assessing financial insecurity at the beginning of services at counseling centers, which can help clinicians develop case conceptualizations, treatment plans, and recommendations that effectively address areas of basic needs and associated distress. While financial insecurities are connected to 4 acute psychological symptoms that counseling centers can effectively support, deprivation of basic needs is not a mental health diagnosis. In fact, it is a microcosm of a larger societal problem of equity and access that needs to be acknowledged and confronted, which requires the cooperative efforts of college counseling centers, external departments, institutional leadership, and local partnerships. Reductions in budgets and resources that impede the delivery of financial health initiatives at institutions could have deleterious and compounding consequences for students’ basic needs that are essential to succeeding academically. Thus, investments in supportive mechanisms, including the counseling center and collaborative case management services, belonging and inclusion initiatives, departments that work with populations that are more likely to report financial insecurity (e.g., adult learners, first-generation students), and other adjunctive support services that fulfill basic needs (e.g., financial aid, dean of students, financial literacy services, food pantries, housing and residence life, disability services), are vital to promote student success.
Read the full report here.