Interpreting Disclosure in the College Application: Narratives of Mental Health in Undergraduate Admissions

While the discussion around mental health on college campuses has become more mainstream in the last decade, little is known about how mental health challenges are discussed among undergraduate admission officers (AOs). AOs play an important role as institutional gatekeepers, and yet no research has examined what these professionals believe about mental health and how they interpret the disclosure of mental health challenges in the application. Through interviews with 26 undergraduate admission officers, we draw on social and cultural models of disability to investigate how admission officers (re)produce narratives around mental health disability in their interpretation of mental health disclosures within a particular part of the application, the counselor recommendation letter. We found that participants typically defined and described mental health challenges through narratives focused on perseverance and student support, relying on medical perspectives that perpetuate views of disability as an individual condition that can be overcome. Our findings have implications for postsecondary admission policy as well as for the work of admission and high school counseling professionals.