OPINION: Student Counseling Center Not Valuable Enough For Student Funding

(Source: 401(k) 2012 via Flickr)

In my research on student fees, The Student Counseling Center stands out as a unique situation. At roughly $322,000 dollars per year, its budget is the third largest out the $2.6 million Student Service Fee budget. It’s huge!  However, what does The Student Counseling Center actually do that makes it worthy of all that money?

In my opinion, the answer is: "not much." I don’t think the counseling center is worthy of student funding and I think the appropriations committee should find a better project for student funding. 

For example, one of the reasons for this is because a counseling service is very expensive. For example, just the employee salaries alone in the counseling center’s past appropriations requests often total over $208,000 dollars. What students mostly pay for are skilled counselors who can service student clients with their trained attention.

However, on top of this is that the student counseling center's reach is very short. Despite the high amount of funding it gets for skilled workers, the Center reached a total of 605 individual students through counseling sessions in the 2021-2022 academic year, according to a departmental report, merely six percent of the student population. In other words, this means that approximately 94 percent went unreached despite its large appropriation.

Now lastly, this illustrates that the counseling center's service doesn't scale. In other words, the more you do it will not really change the extent of its reach nor the counselors' productivity. To try to put it another way, the "dollar-for-value ratio" (as we will call it) caps at however many student clients a counselor can manage, let's say, in a week. So that's as far as each counselor's productivity will reach.

Unlike campus events, where student dollars can reach more students if the event is popular, student dollars for a counseling service are fixed to the counselor’s output. That is, one counselor equals [whatever the most number of students he can serve (which is approximately 23 cases per week, according to the Center’s reporting)]. 

So, in this case, the value the student dollars can bring are fixed to the counselor's best output. The student dollars' reach won't be any farther than this. So unlike an event, such as the crawfish boil or a guest speaker event, the counseling center's value doesn’t scale to reach a larger population when it becomes a greater success. Unlike a campus event, the return value students can see from their investment in the counseling center is very fixed. This gives the center a short reach and the student body a minimal return on its investment. This is another reason why the student counseling center is not worthy of its funding in comparison to alternatives.

So, regardless of the perceived nobility of the student counseling center's work, the value the student constituency receives in return for its financial support just doesn’t add up. Student counseling is expensive, it reaches a small amount of the student body for its cost and it just does not scale with new financial investments. In light of the appropriations committee's scarce resources, the committee would do better to invest in student services that provide a better return on investment to the student body, such as those that are cost-effective, stretch to meet a larger student audience and can return as much value-for-dollar to the fee-paying student population. 

Unfortunately, the student counseling center does not meet those criteria and the appropriations committee should therefore direct its funding to areas that better serve the student community. 

Twitter: @jhescock12

Feature image: (Source: 401(k) 2012 via Flickr)