A “substantial increase in academic distress” among students in the 2020-21 school year was reflected in the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s 2021 annual report.
Although CCMH is housed at Penn State, it collects information from hundreds of colleges that contribute to global research, according to its project manager, Alaina Cummins.
The 2021 annual report pulled data from 180 colleges and universities, Cummins said.
According to Brett Scofield, acting co-senior director of counseling and psychology services at Penn State and executive director of CCMH, the “most remarkable finding” of the report is the significant increase in academic distress reported by students.
Scofield said students’ motivation, focus and “difficulty engaging” with a virtual classroom format may be some of the reasons for increased school distress.
“[There’s] also the fact that this particular type of learning platform may have been incompatible with students’ learning style preferences,” Scofield said.
Aaron Pincus, a Penn State psychology professor and licensed psychologist, said he wasn’t too surprised by this musing in the report.
“The pandemic has disrupted everyone’s life, and I think it has disrupted student life in unique ways because of the importance of in-person experiences and social experiences in college,” Pincus said. “It was probably devastating to a lot of students’ expectations of what their year would be like.”
Penn State previously announced that 96% of classes would be held in person throughout the 2021-22 school year, and Pincus said he noted an impactful shift from that return.
“I’m in undergraduate classes for two in-person classes this semester, so all I can say is I’ve been smitten with student engagement this semester, returning to face-to-face,” said pincus. “They seem to really want to be there – in a way that’s maybe different than it was, and I think that creates a very positive classroom experience.”
The annual report also said that “depression and generalized anxiety leveled off in 2020-21 after rising steadily for years.”
Although Scofield said it’s “unclear” why, there are some theories about this discovery.
“If you look at the numbers from when you ask clinicians why students come to therapy, the anxiety actually increases,” Scofield said. “But when you look at it from a student self-assessment perspective, that’s where it leveled off.”
Scofield said this may be due to the discrepancy between measuring the general concept of anxiety and measuring individual symptoms. This discrepancy was also apparent in the CCMH blog in February 2021, which compared reports of anxiety symptoms in fall 2019 and fall 2020.
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“[The blog] showed that when you looked at specific symptoms, there were specific symptoms that increased – like isolation, sleep problems, easy fear, racing thoughts, general fear, tension,” said Scofield. “But other aspects of anxiety have gone down, like [the symptom of] “I’m afraid of having an anxiety attack in public” which decreased because people were not in public. »
Scofield also said the student self-report data is based on a “symptom monitoring checklist.”
Stephanie Stama, staff psychologist at CAPS, also offered some theories on this particular element of the report.
“One of many hypotheses as to why these stabilize during the pandemic may be related to post-traumatic growth,” Stama said via email. “In other words, perhaps the pandemic has given people a renewed perspective, offered the opportunity to re-prioritize and [encouraged] people to live authentically according to their values.
The CCMH report also looked at reports on the Clinical Load Index — a tool to “examine how counselor workload is associated with the care students receive at these counseling centers,” according to Scofield.
The CLI was first introduced in 2019 and the 2021 report showed how high workload centers are caring for people with critical and security needs, according to the report.
“What we’ve found is that when counselors have smaller caseloads, they’re able to provide more care to all students, including those with critical and safety needs who are often priorities for universities,” said Scofield.
Because the CCMH report reflects the averages of more than 100 colleges and universities, the reports aren’t available on whether Penn State’s services are ranked as a high CLI, according to Scofield.
“We serve a significant number of students here — and it’s good that we have students contacting us for care,” Scofield said. “And we recognize that because we have a high demand for services at Penn State, students have a variety of avenues to seek help – so we’re making it available at Penn State CAPS.”
CAPS WellTrack, CAPS Chat services, brief counseling services offering daily walk-in visits, and group counseling are some of the available avenues Scofield has indicated for student care.
“We also have online mental health screenings for any student who wants to self-check in,” Cummins said.
Stama said CAPS Services uses data from CCMH’s annual report to “review and adjust services and procedures with the goal of adapting to the landscape of student mental health needs.”
Scofield said CLI results allow for “more active dialogue” and “transparent discussion” between students and university services.
“We talk about alignment, and I think that’s important information for universities to know about the services they have and the association with the providence of care so they know what they can offer students and what stakeholders can expect to receive.”
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