Tuition is expensive. Well, relatively speaking, it isn’t. Still, tens of thousands is nothing to shrug at. I’d imagine that, for many, how the number is determined seems to be a relatively arbitrary process. In a purely visceral sense, tuition is what it is because — well, just because.
In the end, though, tuition costs cover just about every service, seen or otherwise, that may be used at any given time on campus. This has both positive and negative effects. In some cases, we may be getting penny pushed. For example, you may spend four years at Binghamton University unknowingly paying the athletic fee component of tuition and not once attending a single BU sporting event or playing an intramural sport. If this accurately describes you, say au revoir to your money. Truthfully, this is an unavoidable reality, and the possibility exists that in any given year, thousands of your tuition dollars will go toward funding a service you will never use.
Here’s an example of a place where your money isn’t going to waste: the University Counseling Center.
The Counseling Center, as per its website, lists its services as “individual and group psychotherapy, an eating awareness program; the 20:1 sexual assault fraternity peer education program; and Interpersonal Violence Prevention, a comprehensive program for victims of sexual assault, abuse, stalking and bullying.”
But here’s the kicker: It’s free.
As a Binghamton University student, use of the Counseling Center is included in the tuition you pay. The shock value of that fact is probably relatively low among the student population. It’s tough to envision the unveiling of counseling services as free sending a student into some paroxysm. The prevailing narrative would suggest, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
In the real world (I’m taking some creative liberty here in suggesting that BU and the real world, for argument’s purposes, are mutually exclusive), the notion of free counseling is absolutely inconceivable. Not only is counseling not free, but it is also frequently very expensive.
In addition, because the Counseling Center is University-sanctioned, it guarantees a quality staff. And said staff, led by Johann Fiore-Conte, is just that — quality. The diversity of their services — group and individual, psychological and sexual — is truly remarkable.
So what does all of this mean? To begin, it isn’t a beckon for everyone to immediately shuffle over and flood the Counseling Center. Still, it is a suggestion that its services are perhaps underutilized. Counselors can be a safe haven for students suffering from stress, anxiety and depression. It’s also important to keep in mind that the degrees to which people may be suffering from some type of affliction are mostly irrelevant. If you need help, they’ll help you.
Of course, there are some qualifiers. For one, there certainly exists some form of stigma against receiving counseling. Societal or otherwise, it’s an obviously misinformed stigma. This isn’t something that’ll change overnight, but the center’s accommodations for confidentiality and clandestine operations certainly help, if only slightly, to ameliorate this phenomenon.
Arguably more trying, however, is the fact that the Counseling Center is packed. As it is, receiving an individual appointment is tough. Appointments are backlogged, and while it still provides for emergency appointments, students will often have to wait for a long time to be helped.
But wait, if the Counseling Center is so packed that students are left waiting weeks to be seen, how is it possibly underutilized?
I’d suggest that the center being backlogged and the center being underutilized (unlike Binghamton University and the real world) are not mutually exclusive. If anything, the fact that the center is so frequently used is a testament to the quality and efficacy of its services, which is to say that more people ought to use them.
Accommodating more people, if they were to seek counseling services (which they should), becomes the new issue. This will be a tough one to solve. A good place to start would be to increase the staff numbers at the Counseling Center, but this has understandable limitations. A solid, more realistic, point of emphasis would be for the Counseling Center to expand its referral program, whereby it refers students who need help to medical professionals in the greater Binghamton area when the University Counseling Center cannot provide for them in a timely or effective manner as a result of staff limitations. Reinforcing emphasis on group therapy would also provide for a nominal expansion of the center’s capabilities.
Many of these policies aimed at expanding the services of the University Counseling Center may involve reallocating some of the funding that goes toward other services on campus, which isn’t to say that other services aren’t also important. Or it may involve paying just a bit more in tuition, no matter how arbitrary it may seem upon first glance. But it’s worth it.
Why is it worth it? Because, with no empirical or anecdotal evidence whatsoever to verify this claim, I’d venture to believe that the University Counseling Center has saved a life. If not many, then at least one.
That’s no waste.