Modelling student preferences for the design of campus counselling services

ABSTRACT

Increasing rates of mental ill-health among students in higher education has led to rising demand for campus counselling services and longer waiting times, while considerable unmet need also exists. To design more effective services, it is important to understand what aspects of service provision are most valued by students. We present results from a choice experiment using a survey of over 5,000 students in Ireland. Waiting time is the most important attribute for students, which has implications for the funding of services and we discuss ways in which this could be addressed. We also find considerable preference heterogeneity for attributes across students and we consider how this can be incorporated in the design of effective services. Finally, we address the issue of how any changes in the provision of campus counselling services might be financed, which is a particularly important issue within resource-constrained education sectors.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• counselling services
• students
• preference heterogeneity
• discrete choice experiment
• generalised multinomial logit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 36% of those in the estimation sample never chose the opt-out alternative, while 4% always chose the opt-out.

2 See https://youtu.be/-mkGs7Wr3z4.

3 Upon completion of the survey, respondents were also provided with information on various support agencies. Ethical approval was provided by the NUI Galway Research Ethics Committee.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Irish Research Council (IRC) Research for Policy and Society award (RfPS/2016/25). The funders had no role in the design of the study; the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; the writing of the paper; or the decision to submit the paper for publication.