March Madness: Why You Should Consider Mental Health Services When Choosing a College
Publish Date: April 6, 2026
Author: Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman
Source: Shrink Speak substack
Access to meaningful mental health support can make the difference between a student thriving or struggling to stay afloat in the most vulnerable years of their young adulthood.
While the last several weeks have seen much of the country preoccupied with the "March Madness" of the NCAA basketball tournament, many high school seniors anxiously await the results of their college entrance applications. Their emotions will fluctuate wildly as they learn where they will enter college in the fall. Their choices in which universities to apply to mirror their self-image and aspirations, as well as those of their parents, and will indelibly influence their futures.
In deciding where to apply and which colleges to attend, students weigh numerous factors, including the quality of faculty and curriculum, appearance of the campus, the prestige and reputation of the university, cost and availability of financial aid, the nature of campus social life, and even the caliber of the sports teams. The one area that students and their parents will likely fail to take into account, however, is the quality of the school’s mental health services—an omission that could have serious consequences in the years ahead.
Why should access to quality mental health services matter when students are deciding where to attend college? The simple answer is that the college years and student experience are closely aligned with the onset of mental disorders in young people. Depression, schizophrenia, bipolar anxiety, and eating and substance use disorders all commonly develop in adolescence and young adulthood. When you combine this reality with the stresses of today's college environment, you end up with a substantial number of students who may well need mental health care during the period of their college education.
This situation is borne out by the fact that approximately 30 percent of matriculating college students are taking psychotropic medications. College entails circumstances and experiences that many students will encounter for the first time – being away from home and independence from parents, rigorous academic demands, exposure to recreational drugs and alcohol, and sexual freedom. This novel and challenging environment is complicated by the increased frequency of on-campus physical and sexual violence as well as the rising occurrence of self-harmful behaviors and suicide.
Students and their parents must be open to the possibility that the students might need urgent mental health services at some point during their college careers.
Moreover, young people today must contend with stressors that previous generations never encountered at this scale or intensity. Heavy social media use has been consistently linked to poorer mental health among young adults, including depression driven by social comparison, disrupted sleep, and emotional burnout. At the same time, a 24/7 media environment – shaped by algorithms designed to maximize engagement – delivers a constant stream of commentary on global crises and polarizing issues, heightening baseline anxiety. Campus culture can further compound this pressure: students who hold controversial or non-mainstream views often report a reluctance to speak openly, contributing to a climate of self-censorship.
Unfortunately, most schools are ill-prepared to meet the manifest needs of their students and lack adequate, much less optimal mental health services. Rather than addressing the problem fully and proactively, they react to individual crises or clusters of incidents when they occur. Recent examples of this include a rise in suicides and suicide attempts, with notable incidents at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and Middlebury College, and campus unrest related to Israel-Palestine protests. Universities were unprepared for these crises – yet few have taken steps to improve mental health services in their wake.
Most schools are ill-prepared to meet the manifest needs of their students and lack adequate, much less optimal mental health services.
Historically, healthcare has not been central to the mission of institutions of higher education. As student health services have evolved, mental health has been an afterthought, only somewhat reluctantly incorporated into the repertoire. Indeed, universities remain unsure of and even ambivalent about how much responsibility they should assume for the young charges in their care. At the same time, many parents are wary of educational institutions taking over the health care of their children. Consequently, university administrators find themselves in a no-win situation.
Nevertheless, I would advise universities to take a proactive approach to student mental health and establish state-of-the-art, comprehensive youth mental health services. Adopting this strategy is the right thing to do, and it will mitigate the risk to students and the institution – more than making up the costsof providing these services.
For their part, students and their parents must be open to the possibility that the students might need mental health services, often urgent, at some point during their college careers. For this reason, they would be well advised to include the quality and availability of mental health services along with traditional considerations as they decide where to attend.