A Gallup survey of 6,000 college students conducted in fall 2024, published in the State of Higher Education 2025 report with the Lumina Foundation, found that roughly one in three students seriously considered dropping out that semester — and emotional stress and mental health struggles were the top reason cited, ahead of cost and even ahead of feeling like they didn’t belong. That’s not a wellness footnote. That’s the single largest driver of near-attrition in the dataset.
Students already say support services work when they use them
The encouraging half of the picture: a national survey by TimelyCare, reported by Inside Higher Ed in early 2025, found that three in four students believe the mental health support their institution offers makes them more likely to graduate. Students credited these services with helping them manage stress and anxiety, improve their grades, and manage depression. The services aren’t the weak link. Utilization is.
That’s the gap worth closing. Plenty of institutions already fund counseling centers, case management, and crisis lines. The students who need them most are often the ones least likely to walk in the door — not because the service is inadequate, but because reaching out requires a student to believe, in that moment, that someone on the other end will actually understand what they’re dealing with.
Why utilization, not capacity, is the real bottleneck
Wait times and staffing ratios matter, and they get most of the budget conversation. But a service a student never approaches doesn’t help their retention numbers no matter how well-staffed it is. The students most likely to disengage quietly — instead of asking for help — are frequently the same students least likely to trust that the request will be met with understanding rather than a checklist.
This is where the frontline matters as much as the clinical staff. Advisors, RAs, faculty, and department staff are usually the first point of contact, long before a student books an appointment with a counselor. Whether that first contact goes well often determines whether the referral ever happens.
Where empathy training changes the equation
Empathy training for the staff who interact with students daily — not just clinical counselors — is one of the few interventions that directly targets the utilization gap rather than the capacity gap. When a professor, advisor, or front-desk staff member can recognize distress and respond without judgment, students are more likely to accept a referral instead of quietly disappearing. It’s a comparatively low-cost lever next to expanding clinical headcount, and it works on exactly the barrier the Gallup data points to: students not reaching for the help that’s already there.
The leadership takeaway
If your student support services are underutilized relative to the demand the data suggests exists, the fix isn’t necessarily more counselors — it’s making sure every staff member a distressed student is likely to encounter first knows how to make that student comfortable enough to take the next step. That’s a trainable, measurable investment, and it’s one that turns an existing service budget into an actual retention outcome.