The Doctoral program at the Univerity of Wyoming is at risk of being dissolved. Please read below to understand the repercussions of cutting this program, which include further limiting the mental health resources for the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and greater Wyoming communities.

The doctoral counseling program educates, trains, and provides supervision to master’s level students who work with clients across multiple degrees of mental health concerns. These concerns include but are not limited to, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Each first-year master’s level student completes a minimum of 40 hours of unpaid direct client counseling hours, whereby a cohort of 25 students yields 1,000 hours of free community mental health services annually. Doctoral students provide supervision to each master’s student, over 5 hours per week, to maintain ethical and optimal treatment for the client. If eliminated, the university will have to outside hire supervisors to ensure the continuation of the WellSpring Clinic. The support and supervision provided by doctoral students is unparalleled in any other university setting and is more cost-effective than hiring instructors to supervise and educate master’s students. Keeping the doctoral students is critical to ensuring that the master’s program operates most efficiently while maintaining minimal influence on the university budget. Any change to that significant level of supervision would notably decrease the quality of the master’s program and have significant implications on the budget.

In addition to the work done with master’s students, the doctoral students support the faculty in co-teaching (100 hours a semester per class), running the WellSpring Clinic (40 hours a week), grading, research, and more. Without the doctoral program, this responsibility falls to faculty that are already juggling their own workload, caseloads, and research. If the doctoral program is terminated, the faculty, who are expected to spend 25% of their time on research, will now oversee supervision of the cohort, totaling an additional 130 hours per week of work with one less faculty member to help them reach this goal. This creates an unstable work environment for the faculty. In the short-term, this presents a critical concern for retention. In the long-term, it will decrease the annual number of students accepted to the master’s program, which will lessen the money the university will get from tuition and fees. Faculty are essential to support the students, regardless of a teach-out plan for students.

Help us to keep this program running so that we may continue to serve the mental health of UW, Laramie, and Wyoming communities to the best of our abilities. 

If you want to know more about our clinic or what we do please check out the Wellspring counseling page: http://www.uwyo.edu/clad/counseling/wellspring-counseling-clinic.html