As reported on CBSSports.com, this week, the selection committee for the College Football Playoff will release its first national ranking of 2025. The use of rankings in college football has a history of controversy. Even at the start of the 2025 season, SI.com released a report warning of flaws with the ranking system. However, the use of national rankings has extended throughout higher education, including various publications issuing national rankings of campus counseling centers.
In 2024, Forbes.com released a report outlining how members of the executive board for the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) shared concerns about mental health rankings. These concerns included the possible implications that all schools are systematically compared to one another, the lack of standardization of how schools are measured, and promoting a philosophy of measuring value by an external list. These concerns seem applicable to national mental health rankings released in 2025. For example, in this year’s rankings of Best Student Support and Counseling Services by the Princeton Review, only two schools listed in the top 25 included a full-time enrollment of greater than 10,000 students.
The Benefits Of A Grading System Over Rankings
Last month, a report on Research.com detailed the potential benefits of a standards-based grading system. These benefits included focusing on mastery of a subject matter/criteria, providing feedback on how to improve performance, and being able to track progress over time. Though this report is centered on academics, the listed benefits can improve the assessment of campus counseling centers. There’s no benefit in simply ranking a student counseling center on one campus as being better/worse than another student counseling center on a completely different campus. What’s more helpful to students, parents, and administrators is knowing how a counseling center meets the standards of the field, what the strengths and limitations of the center are, and gauging how the center has functioned over multiple years.
The Need For Standards Instead of Subjective Rankings
National rankings usually include subjective perceptions. For example, the rankings listed by the Princeton Review involved asking students their opinion of counseling services; however, there was no apparent listing for how many students received services, why students gave their responses, or what percentages of students at each school participated in the survey. Furthermore, the lack of objectified standards is problematic.
A major task for many professional organizations is setting benchmark standards for the field. I currently serve as the President-Elect of the AUCCCD, and every year this organization releases a survey among directors of student counseling centers. This survey provides general information on standards, such as wait-times for students to access services, the range of services offered by counseling centers, if counseling centers are fully staffed, the impact of counseling services on academic outcomes (i.e. helping students stay in school), and utilization rates of counseling services by students. Factors such as these give an objective view on the operations of a counseling center.
No Competition Equals No Need For Rankings
Unlike collegiate athletic teams, college counseling centers are not in competition with one another. It’s common for counseling center directors to freely share innovative ideas with one another. In addition, most counseling centers have the mission to address the mental health needs of students on their specific campus. Because there’s so much variation between campuses and student bodies, it’s unrealistic to rank counseling centers against each other every year.
Asking students their opinion of counseling services is vitally important, but this is why most counseling centers collect feedback data from their clients. This feedback data is not included in most national rankings, and there’s also concern that mental health rankings may not be generated by mental health professionals. In addition, some might perceive that the intent of developing mental health rankings is to create publicity. Because of similar concerns related to college football, the role of national rankings in the sport has changed during recent years. As such, it might be beneficial to change the role of national mental health rankings.
