Date of Award

12-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Program

Counselor Education

Department

Counselor Education

Major Professor

Michelle E. Wade

Second Advisor

David Robinson-Morris

Third Advisor

Zarus Watson

Abstract

College counseling has been integral to higher education for more than a century; however, the role of college counselors has become increasingly complex amid rising student mental health needs, growing symptom severity, and constrained institutional resources. Despite extensive research on college student mental health, little contemporary scholarship has examined the lived experiences of the professionals providing these services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how college counselors who provide mental health services perceive their professional role within the context of higher education.

Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study conceptualized college counselors as embedded within interconnected institutional, professional, and sociocultural systems that shape their work and identity. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the study sought to understand counselors’ lived experiences and meaning-making processes as both mental health practitioners and employees of higher education institutions. Participants were purposively sampled from public, mid-sized, four-year universities and included licensed or pre-licensed clinicians whose primary responsibilities involved providing direct mental health services to students. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and analyzed through an interpretive lens emphasizing the relationship between individual experiences and broader institutional structures.

Findings from this study aim to illuminate role tensions, perceived expectations, and systemic influences affecting college counselors’ professional identity and practice. By centering the voices of college counselors, this research contributes to a critical gap in the literature and offers implications for counseling center leadership, higher education administrators, and counselor education programs seeking to better support counselors and strengthen campus mental health systems.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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