Our college campuses are, it seems, awash in crises that call for costly programs to treat them. Are they real, or is this an instance of sophisticated grifting?
In today’s Martin Center article, Peter Wood (president of the National Association of Scholars) casts his eye upon a recent report on campus mental-health centers. He’s very skeptical of the claims of “crisis.”
Here’s a slice:
The new data for 2023 reinforce all these lessons. Students who sought counseling that year were more likely than ever to have been counseled before and to have “psychotropic medication.” Those who had had prior counseling amounted to 61 percent of the total, and 47 percent of counselees reported a “history of trauma.” One might infer from this that the prior counseling didn’t work very well and that an extraordinary number of college students arrived on campus “traumatized.” Of course, the definition of “trauma” these days is pretty fluid. Perhaps some of these students were traumatized by classmates who refused to use their preferred pronouns. The chart that supports the level of “traumatic events” in CCMH’s report doesn’t break them down beyond the categories “unwanted sexual contact,” “experienced harassing, controlling, and/or abusive behavior,” and “experienced traumatic event.”
Read the whole thing.