TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE STATE

of the mental-health safety net at America's colleges, SmartMoney polled counseling directors, advisers and student-life administrators at more than 50 schools. We found that when it comes to practices and resources, there's no such thing as "normal": Schools vary enormously in everything from wait times for appointments to training requirements for hotline counselors.

As you might expect, large public universities generally have to stretch their budgets farther, on a per-student basis, than do smaller liberal-arts colleges, and getting care at those bigger schools often means longer wait times. But we still found some surprising disparities: The University of Wisconsin-Madison and UCLA, for example, have nearly identically sized student populations but you'll wait just one to two days for a counseling appointment at Wisconsin, compared to 10 days at the California school. Another surprise: Although many students rely on psychiatrists to monitor their use of prescription antidepressants, nearly half the colleges we surveyed lack a full-time psychiatrist on staff including several schools with relatively big counseling budgets of $100 per student or more.

See the chart below or download an excel spreadsheet of it.