Texas higher education is navigating a new reality. Student mental health is no longer a student services issue at the margins of institutional strategy; it is a core condition of student success, shaping persistence, completion, and the ability of learners to fully participate in the educational experience. Yet, even as community colleges and universities have increased support in recent years, many efforts across the state remain fragmented and difficult to scale in ways that are actionable, sustainable, and measurable. That is why a coalition of Texas higher education institutions and nonprofit partners developed Strengthening Texas College Student Mental Health: A Practical Playbook for the State of Texas, a resource designed to help all college leaders move beyond awareness and into coordinated action.

Dallas College, together with Alamo Colleges District, Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, Texas State University System, and Trellis Strategies, created this playbook as a clear roadmap for leaders who need practical guidance. The strategies are intentionally flexible; they are meant to be adapted to individual campus contexts rather than applied as a one-size-fits-all checklist. The playbook is grounded in a simple premise: Improving student mental health requires systems-level strategies to fit the postsecondary environment, not a set of disconnected programs that depend on a few champions.

Why This Matters Now

Texas has made substantial investments in behavioral health, including major new commitments in recent legislative cycles. However, investment is not the same as alignment. Postsecondary institutions require a strategy tailored to the realities of campus life, and the need is urgent. Nearly half of Texas college students report symptoms of depression or anxiety, and provider shortages across the state—particularly in rural counties—compound access inequality. Where mental health services are in place, awareness gaps remain, especially among community college students. For leaders, the question is not whether student mental health matters but whether our institutions are designed to meet students where they are early, consistently, and with the kind of coordinated infrastructure that makes support real, not aspirational.

How the Playbook Can Help

Strengthening Texas College Student Mental Health is not a call for institutions to do everything. It is a guide for building an integrated campus mental health ecosystem that combines prevention and treatment, engages multiple departments, and infuses support into the student experience. It encourages leaders to start with shared framing, then to choose targeted actions that match their college’s capacity, needs, and environment.

The playbook is honest, noting that meaningful implementation can require investment in staff capacity, technology, and data resources, and that it can take time to align stakeholders and funding streams. But it also provides concrete actions that colleges can begin now in the form of in-practice strategies embedded in each section.  

Five Recommendations That Translate Mission Into Action

At the center of the playbook are five actionable recommendations—a strategic path forward for higher education leaders in Texas and beyond. These recommendations can help colleges move from siloed services to a system that works.

Adopt a Public Health Approach to Overall Well-Being

Too often, institutions treat mental health as synonymous with counseling. A public health approach broadens the frame: It spans health promotion, early identification, and crisis response, and organizes supports so that students encounter them throughout their journey, not only when they reach a breaking point. The playbook recommends selecting one or more organizing frameworks to guide this work and keep campus efforts aligned.

Develop a Data-Driven Mental Health Ecosystem

A data-driven ecosystem entails collecting and using multiple forms of data across student groups to identify gaps and barriers, understand what students experience, and track progress. The playbook also encourages institutions to conduct an implementation assessment to clarify current maturity and identify opportunities for improvement.

Close Gaps in Student Access and Outcomes

This recommendation is explicit: Institutions should pair data-informed action with stigma reduction, early supports, peer engagement, and the removal of structural and financial barriers to care. It is not enough to increase services in general; leaders must ask which students still cannot access support and why.

Cultivate Caring Campuses and Communities

Mental health is shaped by more than therapy appointments. When basic needs are unmet, when belonging is fragile, or when navigating help is confusing or feels stigmatizing, student well-being declines. The playbook calls for campuswide networks to connect students to support and highlights basic needs insecurity as a compounding factor.

Maximize the Mental Health Care Workforce

Texas faces a supply-and-demand gap in mental health providers. The playbook urges institutions to use existing resources strategically while also developing credentials and pathways that meet current and future regional and state needs for mental health professionals.

A Model for Student Well-Being and Mental Health

If the playbook offers the what and how, many leaders also want proof that systems-level change can deliver results at scale. Dallas College’s experience scaling well-being infrastructure provides one example of how that transformation can look when support is treated as an institutional strategy rather than as an add-on.

At Dallas College, the shift began with a unifying framework: the Learner Care Model, a proactive, coordinated student support system built on centralized care and shared responsibility. Rather than requiring students to navigate a fragmented student journey, the model integrates faculty and supports the student, using a single point of entry and warm handoffs across services. We then built systemwide infrastructure through the Student Care Network, a centralized access point that connects mental health counseling, health services and promotion, basic needs, and care coordination, reducing duplication and strengthening continuity of care.

In scaling this work, we doubled the number of mental health professionals and nurses, added licensed counselors and social workers on each campus, expanded care coordinator roles, increased health promotion staffing, and established basic needs hubs across campuses. Critically, we prioritized measurement and sustainability. As a result, we have seen persistence and retention rates increase by 5-10 percentage points for students engaged with well-being and social support services relative to institutional averages.

Even for institutions with very different contexts, the takeaway is this: Designing well-being as institutional infrastructure, with centralized leadership, needs assessment first, and measurable outcomes, creates replicable principles that can be adapted elsewhere. This is precisely the kind of scaling logic the playbook is designed to enable: coherent framing, shared ownership, systematic implementation, and continuous improvement rather than episodic efforts.

Use the Playbook as a Roadmap

The most important thing to know about Strengthening Texas College Student Mental Health is that it was designed to be used. It includes high-level, practical guidance flexible enough to be applied across institutional contexts and provides worksheets to help stakeholders organize and prioritize strategies for their campus. These tools can empower all of us to make a measurable impact on our campuses, especially for students who are most at risk. The playbook is an invitation to lead in barrier-busting work that improves student mental health, well-being, and, ultimately, success.

Carlos Cruz, Ed.D., is Associate Vice Chancellor, Well Being and Social Support, and Navi Dhaliwal, M.Sc., is Director, Research Institute, at Dallas College in Dallas, Texas.

Opinions expressed in Member Spotlight are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Innovation in the Community College.