How campuses usually purchase mental health services
If you’ve evaluated a mental health services provider in the last few years, you’ve likely seen the same structure more than once.
Your campus pays a rate tied to total enrollment. Every enrolled student is covered, and each one gets a set number of sessions or services for the year. For an additional cost, some providers add a shared pool of services for students who use up their “subscription” allocation. Whatever goes unused at the end of the year or the contract usually expires.
| Contract element | How it typically works |
|---|---|
| Basis of price | Rate tied to total enrollment |
| What each student gets | A set number of sessions, fixed in advance |
| Overflow | For an additional cost, some providers add a shared pool of additional services |
| Unused capacity | Generally expires at the end of the year or contract |
| What the campus can plan against | One predictable number for the budget |
This became the standard for good reasons. It gives your finance office one number to plan against, it’s easy to compare across vendors, and on paper every student is covered.
It’s a clean model. It just rests on one assumption.
The assumption: that students use counseling at roughly the same rate
The data tells a different story.
In the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s 2026 report, counseling centers served an average of 10.2% of enrolled students in a year. Among the students who came in, the most common number of appointments was one and the median was four, while the top 10% of clients accounted for 34% of all appointments and averaged 20 each.
Demand doesn’t spread evenly across your student body. It concentrates, and a model priced on the average misses students at both ends.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Average utilization of counseling services | 10.2% of enrolled students |
| Centers serving under 5% of their enrollment | 23.2% of centers |
| Most common number of appointments, per student seen, per year (individual treatment) | 1 |
| Median appointments per student seen (individual treatment) | 4 |
| Average appointments per student seen (individual treatment) | 5.29 |
| Top 20% of students seen | 57% of all appointments, averaging 15 each |
| Top 10% of students seen | 34% of all appointments, averaging 20 each |
| Full range | 1 to 77 appointments per student |
We built our model around what students actually use.
Your campus purchases a volume of services scoped to your own expected demand, and you pay for the services students actually use. There’s no per-student fee and no allocation assigned to any individual. Students use services as they need them.
If your campus needs more during the year, you can add services at any point. If you don’t use everything you purchased, the remainder rolls over to the following year and doesn’t expire.
The difference that matters to you: we’re paid for services delivered, not for total enrollment. When students don’t engage, we don’t earn. Your success is our success, and student needs stay the priority.
| Enrollment-based pricing | BetterMynd |
|---|---|
| Every enrolled student | Sessions and calls delivered |
| A set number of services, fixed in advance | No individual limits; services available as needed |
| Generally expires at the end of the year or contract | Rolls-over to the following year and does not expire |
| Varies by contract | Available at any point in the year |
| Unchanged | Matched to actual usage |
“What happens if we run out?”
This is the question we hear most often.
In practice, running out is not a concern. Because unused sessions and calls roll-over, if you buy more than you need, you don’t lose the difference. You’re carrying a credit – and therefore savings – into next year.
Scoping is a recommendation, not a commitment. We size your initial volume together, looking at enrollment, residential mix, counseling center staffing, and what comparable campuses have actually used. It’s meant to be approximately right rather than exactly right, because roll-over absorbs the difference either way.
And if demand runs ahead of the estimate, you can add more at any point in the year. Nothing about this model asks you to get the number exactly right in advance.
Think of it the way you think about dining services. Campuses scope food service against what their community actually consumes, and nobody worries about running out of meals.
| Under a fixed allocation | With BetterMynd |
|---|---|
| Some students hit the cap and the campus buys an overflow pool, while the vast majority of unused services remain allocated to students who won’t use them | Add capacity at any point in the year |
| The campus paid for what it did not use | The remainder rolls-over into next year |
| Renegotiation, if the contract allows it | Scope up when it happens |
| Has to be right, because the error is permanent | Designed to be approximately right, because roll-over absorbs it |
How do we measure impact beyond utilization?
Everything above is about how your campus buys. This is about measuring the impact of the services you’ve bought.
How outcomes are measured:
We measure student distress with the CCAPS-34, the gold-standard instrument built specifically for college student mental health, developed by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) and used across a research network of more than 850 college counseling centers.
Through our exclusive licensing of the CCAPS-34, BetterMynd provides a comprehensive view of student-specific stressors and a wider array of psychological concerns, including:
- Depression
- Generalized Anxiety
- Social Anxiety
- Academic Distress
- Eating Concerns
- Frustration/Anger
- Alcohol Use
Stop reconciling; start seeing:
With the CCAPS-34, on-campus services and BetterMynd share the same definitions and measures for student presentation and clinical progress. Other providers rely on the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 – narrow, primary-care screeners without regular norming updates and based on the general adult population for depression and generalized anxiety, which leaves you reconciling two different measures.
Even if used together, the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 miss experiences common among college students, such as substance misuse, disordered eating, and academic distress. It is difficult to glean contextual insights about the population without a measure that is created for and normed on the college population.
The CCAPS-34 captures all of these in a single questionnaire, surfacing co-occurring concerns automatically and benchmarking every result against students, not the general population.
The scoring provides a holistic view of which types of distress are driving student needs across both in-person and teletherapy modalities, so you can shape the strategy, resourcing, and programming that best support student success and retention on your campus.
| Assessment elements | Typical online therapy vendor | With BetterMynd |
|---|---|---|
| Scope of measurement | Either no assessment tool is used, or it is unidimensional: the PHQ-9 strictly screens for depression; the GAD-7 strictly screens for generalized anxiety. The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 are “siloed” tools; even combined, they overlook critical common college student presentations like substance misuse, disordered eating, and acute academic panic. | Through its exclusive licensing of the CCMH CCAPS-34, BetterMynd offers multidimensional assessment through 7 subscales simultaneously (Depression, Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Academic Distress, Eating Concerns, Frustration/Anger, Alcohol Use). Included is the Distress Index, a summary measure of a student’s overall psychological distress. |
| Target population | The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 are not normed regularly and focus broadly on the general adult population and are heavily utilized in primary care clinics. | The CCAPS-34 is optimized, validated, and most recently normed in January 2025 on half a million college students navigating counseling services.
Because the CCAPS is managed by CCMH, its cut points (distress scoring indicators) are built on actual data from hundreds of thousands of university peers. This makes it significantly more accurate for contextualizing what “elevated distress” looks like for a student balancing finals, social dynamics, and moving away from home, compared to general adult scales. |
| Student context | The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 are silent on campus dynamics and academic performance. | The CCAPS-34 explicitly measures problems highly relevant to the collegiate experience like Academic Distress, Frustration/Anger, and Social Anxiety in a campus environment. |
| Administrative utility (risk tracking data, institutional insights) | The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 tell you how sick patients are specific to depression and anxiety.
These isolated symptom severity scores miss how those symptoms interact with structural student success (like staying enrolled). | The CCAPS-34 tells you how distressed or at-risk students are – by combining specific symptom elevations with a holistic Distress Index for institutional trackability.
On-campus and teletherapy (BetterMynd) results sit on one instrument, so you report a single picture instead of reconciling two. This integrated view of student progress shows you which types of distress are driving student needs, helping shape the strategy, resourcing, and programming that will best support student success and retention. |
