College Counselors: There When You Need Them?

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.