The Role of Mental Health Counseling in College Students' Academic Success: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis

Retention remains a problem for postsecondary institutions and college students. To address these issues, researchers have sought to identify factors of college success and retention. Findings have consistently shown the importance of psychosocial factors and mental health on college students' academic success. As such, university and college counseling centers are well positioned to enhance students' academic success by addressing psychosocial distress. However, existing literature on the effect of counseling on college students' academic success is mixed, and limitations exist. To address previous limitations of the literature, this study utilized an interrupted time series design to examine differences in students' postcounseling academic success compared to their precounseling academic success. Additionally, we examined the association between changes in students' psychological distress and academic distress for students who endorsed clinical distress at the onset of counseling and changes in their grade point average (GPA) over time. Data for this study consisted of 1,231 clients seen by 49 therapists at a university counseling center. As hypothesized, students' CPAs increased at a greater rate postcounseling compared to precounseling. Additionally, for students who were clinically distressed at the onset of counseling, reductions in their psychological distress were associated with positive changes in their GPA over time, but the relationship between changes in their academic distress and changes in their GPA was not significant. This study suggests that counseling can be beneficial for college students' academic success. in part due to changes in students' psychological distress, but not their academic distress, specifically for clinically distressed students.