Who's qualified to do counseling work?

MPR’s Tim Post has a piece today on the reduction of counselors at Minnesota’s community colleges and universities — even as the number of cases is increasing.

Anoka Technical College counselor Kevin Lindstrom brings up an interesting point when he tells Post what’s wrong with spreading mental-health counseling duties throughout the staff of a college:

“To imply that someone else, no matter how much training they might have had in-house to recognize it, can also equally deal with it I don’t think is fair.”

Read the full story and listen to the audio here.

About the blogger

Alex Friedrich

afriedrich@mpr.org

Alex Friedrich reports on higher education issues for MPR News. Among the stories he has covered: the fall of the Berlin Wall, aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, 2003 Moscow suicide bombing and 2004 presidential elections in the Republic of Georgia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia and a master’s in European political economy from the London School of Economics.

Edorosh

Brining up financial or relationship issues to get advice or help is worrisome enough to a professional- to expect students to use untrained or otherwise trained people because no counselors are available seems like a terrible idea.
- Anonymous
  
  That’s a valid point — as is the previous one — in an age when officials talk about the “alignment” of systems and the need to prepare students better for college. Seems to work against that ideal. I’d like to know how officials would compensate for that.
Loper

The same thing is going on with secondary school counselors. Support staff is cut “to
protect the classroom”. Pennywise and pound foolish.