The upcoming release of the College Football Playoff’s initial national ranking for 2025 highlights a recurring debate: the value and impact of national rankings. This discussion extends beyond athletics, reaching into higher education itself, where publications regularly publish rankings of campus counseling centers. However, growing concerns are emerging about the usefulness and potential harm of these mental health rankings.
The Concerns Around Existing Ranking Systems
In 2024, a report from Forbes.com revealed concerns shared by members of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) regarding mental health rankings. Their worries centered on the inherent problems of comparing institutions across the board, the lack of consistent measurement practices, and the shift towards a model that judges value based on external rankings. These concerns remain relevant as the field contemplates mental health rankings released in 2025. For instance, the Princeton Review’s recent rankings of Best Student Support and Counseling Services show that only two of the top 25 schools have a full-time enrollment exceeding 10,000 students—a significant disparity.
The Case for Standards-Based Evaluation
A recent report on Research.com underscores the potential advantages of a standards-based grading system. These benefits include focusing on mastery of specific criteria, providing targeted feedback for improvement, and allowing for progress tracking over time. While the report focuses on academic performance, its principles can be applied to assessing campus counseling centers. Simply ranking centers as “better” or “worse” across different institutions lacks meaningful context. Instead, a focus on how a center meets professional standards, its specific strengths and limitations, and its performance trends over multiple years provides a more helpful evaluation.
Subjectivity vs. Objective Data
Many national rankings rely on subjective perceptions—often student opinions. The Princeton Review’s rankings, for example, are based on student feedback, yet they offer little detail about the number of students served, the reasons behind the responses, or the percentage of students who participated in the survey. This lack of objective criteria raises concerns.
Professional organizations play a crucial role in establishing benchmark standards for the field. The AUCCCD, for instance, conducts annual surveys of counseling center directors. These surveys provide objective data on key operational factors, such as wait times, the range of services offered, staffing levels, the impact of counseling on student retention, and utilization rates. This data provides a more accurate view of a center’s performance.
Why Competition Isn’t the Goal
Unlike collegiate athletic teams, college counseling centers aren’t in direct competition. Directors often collaborate and freely exchange innovative ideas. Moreover, most counseling centers share the mission of addressing the unique mental health needs of their specific campus community. Considering the considerable variation in campus environments and student demographics, annually ranking centers against each other is inherently unrealistic.
Gathering feedback directly from students is, of course, vital. This is why most counseling centers actively collect feedback data from their clients—information rarely included in national rankings. There’s also concern that these rankings might not be developed or reviewed by mental health professionals, potentially undermining their credibility. Furthermore, some suspect that the creation of mental health rankings is primarily aimed at generating publicity.
It’s unrealistic to rank counseling centers against each other every year, considering the considerable variation in campus environments and student demographics.
Given the similar concerns surrounding college football rankings, the sport has witnessed a shift in how national rankings are perceived. It’s likely that a similar evolution is needed for mental health rankings in higher education, moving away from comparative lists and towards a system based on transparent standards and ongoing evaluation.
The current approach to evaluating college counseling centers needs re-examination. A move toward transparent standards and ongoing assessment, rather than comparative rankings, promises a more valuable and supportive system for students and institutions alike
