I must be discriminatory in thinking that students with significant mental health problems could be better off not at school while their mental health problems are addressed. But I still think so. If, as the article states, “30 percent of college students reported feeling ‘so depressed that it was difficult to function’ at some time over the past year,” that is a LOT of people to care for/accommodate when your purported mission is something different: i.e., to provide an education for all students. And that’s a LOT of resources to make available, which are expensive.
I think there have been many unintended consequences of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I do see a difference between accommodating students who are deaf, blind, wheelchair-bound, undergoing chemo, etc., and students with significant mental illnesses whose disease might include self-harm, self-medicating with legal or illegal drugs, suicide attempts, harming others, etc. If colleges aren’t legally permitted to send those students home, does it then mean that they are liable for anything the student might do to him/herself and others? We seem to be suggesting that every time we reproach a school for a student’s suicide. So how does the school prevent those things from happening?
The schools criticized in the article for poor response to student needs include Princeton, UCSB, Brown, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, UC Berkeley, Amherst, Harvard, NYU, and BU. Many of these schools could afford to use endowment money to create state-of-the-art mental health facilities on campus, but I doubt they’ll go that route. How will the public schools afford it?