Jazmin Guajardo has seen Cal State university system students with the kind of anxiety that “consumes them” not only throughout their day, but outside the normal business hours of the campus mental health center.

“As a peer mentor, I have directly seen these impacts of mental health on student success,” said Guajardo, a student at CSU Channel Islands who serves on the California State University Board of Trustees, during a board meeting this week.

Cal State university system leaders say those are some of the reasons they would like to expand virtual, after-hours crisis support across the university system. Officials say students attended more than 5,400 walk-in or crisis appointments during regular business hours, placed at least 3,500 after-hours crisis calls and were transported to hospitals 177 times in 2024-25.

“Our mandate is clear. After-hours care is essential to a university’s duty of care,” said Dilcie D. Perez, a deputy vice chancellor at the Cal State university system.

But Cal State’s proposed solution is encountering resistance from the union that represents campus counselors. Cal State officials said Wednesday that they are considering expanding their work with TimelyCare, a company that provides students with crisis support through video conferencing and telephone. The California Faculty Association, which represents campus counselors, has previously argued that the service contracts out work that could be done in-house, putting students’ mental health “in the hands of gig economy workers who have not been vetted by the CSU.”

Meanwhile, a key statistic university leaders used to bolster the case for after-hours care was cited out of context.

A presentation to the board of trustees on Wednesday said that Cal State students reported suicidal ideation at a rate double the national average, but that claim compared data from two different surveys. When drawing data from a single survey only, 28.3% of Cal State university system students reported one or more thoughts of committing suicide in the past year, slightly less than the national results, 29.4%.

In a statement, Cal State said it recognizes that it should have compared campus survey results to the national figures from the same survey, the National College Health Assessment (NCHA).

Read the full article about student mental health care at Cal State universities by Amy DiPierro at EdSource.