LEADERSHIP BLOG
Kate Wolfe-Lyga, LMHC, ACS
Vice President of Clinical Operations, BetterMynd
Master of Science, Community Counseling from Syracuse University
Former Counseling Center Director of SUNY Oswego
Former AUCCCD Board Member
If you lead Student Affairs or student wellbeing at a college or university, you already know the weight of the decisions in front of you. Where to allocate resources. How to justify program investments. Whether a new initiative is reaching the students it was designed for. Whether students who never walk into a counseling center are being supported at all.
These decisions require data. And not just any data — data that is consistent, comparable across settings, and grounded in frameworks designed for your student population.
The challenge is that many of the students who most need support are the ones your current systems were not designed to see. They are not on waitlists. They are not in crisis. They may be accessing care through online platforms, through peer referrals, or not at all. And when they do engage, information about their experience often lives in a system that doesn’t speak the same language as the rest of your campus care infrastructure.
That is the visibility gap — and it is one of the most consequential blind spots in higher education mental health today.
Over the past several years, institutions have invested significantly in expanding mental health access: more appointment slots, longer hours, teletherapy partnerships, peer support programs, embedded counselors in residence halls and academic units. These have been meaningful steps toward addressing the gap between who the infrastructure was originally designed to support and who is enrolled.
But expanding access without shared measurement can create a different kind of problem. You may be reaching more students and still not have a clear picture of who they are, what they’re presenting with, or how their needs compare to those being served through on-campus care.
Teletherapy providers often make the case that they support student persistence and success, and my best guess is that most of them do to a certain extent. The challenge is that the clinical assessment instruments typically used cannot fully substantiate that claim. Tools like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 measure psychological symptoms in the general population. While some counseling centers use them, the gold standard in college mental health relies on multidimensional assessments designed specifically for counseling-seeking college students.
When online therapy operates with its own assessment framework — one disconnected from what campus clinicians use — the data it generates becomes difficult to integrate into the broader institutional picture. This does not suggest the care itself is ineffective. It means the insight remains siloed. And siloed insight, no matter how impressively packaged, is difficult to integrate into the story of your students’ needs and how they responded to the resources you provided.
For leaders responsible for allocating resources, reporting to boards, and making the case for continued investment, this fragmentation is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural limitation — one that becomes more pronounced the more an institution relies on partners whose measurement systems were not built for the higher education context.
This is what drew me to the question of assessment alignment in the first place. In my work leading clinical operations for a teletherapy platform — after years inside counseling centers — I saw the same pattern from the other side: students engaging in meaningful care and showing real progress, but whose experience was essentially invisible to the institution.
When we embedded the CCAPS-34 into our assessment framework, the picture changed. Not because the CCAPS created new data, but because it gave that data a shared context.
The CCAPS-34 was developed by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health specifically for counseling-seeking college students. Its norms reflect the population your counseling center serves, and its multidimensional structure captures the complexity of student distress in ways that general population assessments cannot.
When online therapy uses the same instrument your campus clinicians trust, the data becomes directly comparable. That comparability is where institutional insight begins.
It allows leaders to ask questions that matter:
These are not clinical questions alone. They are leadership questions — the kind that inform strategy, justify investment, and connect mental health to the broader institutional mission of student retention and success.
One of the things I have come to appreciate most about working with institutional leaders is how carefully they weigh decisions about care infrastructure. These are not impulse purchases. They are commitments that affect students, staff, budgets, and institutional reputation.
What I hear consistently is that the gap is rarely about willingness to invest. It is about confidence. Leaders want to know that what they are investing in is reaching the students who need it and that the data they receive is trustworthy enough to act on.
This distinction matters in a market where many providers now lead with outcomes data. The question for institutional leaders is not whether a partner reports outcomes, but how those outcomes are measured and what standard they are measured against.
Self-reported student satisfaction scores and internally generated retention claims may look compelling in a slide deck. But when those metrics rely on proprietary instruments that cannot be compared to the rest of your care ecosystem, they are telling you a story about the provider — not about your students.
Aligned assessment offers something fundamentally different. It allows institutions to see not just how many students are being served, but what they are presenting with and how their needs compare to the counseling center population — using the same clinical language campus clinicians already trust.
In a time of increased scrutiny and institutional pressure, this shared measurement reduces risk. It allows online therapy to function as a true extension of the campus care ecosystem rather than a parallel service reporting on its own terms.
Higher education is in a period of sustained pressure on mental health systems. Accreditors, legislators, and governing boards are increasingly focused on outcomes. At the same time, student needs continue to diversify, and many students seek care outside traditional campus counseling services for both practical and personal reasons.
In this environment, it is tempting to look for a single platform that promises to solve everything — access, outcomes, retention, and wellbeing — all at once. Most experienced leaders know the pattern: as platforms become more comprehensive, depth and quality often suffer.
Students are with your institution for a limited time. They cannot afford that kind of compromise.
When assessment is shared across settings — built on instruments designed for your population and validated by the research community that serves higher education — it becomes the connective tissue that allows campus leaders to see clearly, plan strategically, and demonstrate impact with integrity.
The students who never show up on your counseling center waitlist are still your students. They deserve care that is accountable, visible, and aligned with the standards your institution has already established.
At BetterMynd, our adoption of the CCAPS-34 is rooted in a direct conviction: the standards counseling centers have developed over decades should be extended as care expands beyond the campus walls, not replaced with instruments that serve vendor interests. Shared assessment is how we ensure that teletherapy strengthens the institutional ecosystem rather than fragmenting it. We are working toward an expanded national standard of care — inclusive of the online therapy partner — and aligned assessment is imperative to getting there.
The students who never show up on your counseling center waitlist are still your students. They are entitled to care that is accountable, visible, and held to the same standards your institution has already established.
What becomes possible when every care setting speaks the same clinical language?
If that question matters to your institution, we’d like to be part of answering it.
About BetterMynd
Through our network of providers and the power of teletherapy, BetterMynd is empowering college students to get the mental health care they need.
BetterMynd is not an emergency service and should not be used by anyone experiencing a life-threatening or crisis situation. Instead, you should call 911 to get immediate assistance.
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