Universities care about their students’ mental health. Yet that care doesn’t  always translate into the support students receive on campus. Limited  counseling center capacity, a persistent culture of stigma, and fragmented  communication around available resources leave too many students guess ing about where to turn when stress and anxiety escalate. The result is a gap  between institutional intent and student experience. According to a recent  survey, 27% of students said they don’t believe their educational institution  offers sufficient mental health support.  Chapman University’s Student Psychological Counseling Services (SPCS)  provides psychotherapy and mental health resources to students, with a  mission to support their psychological well-being as they pursue personal  and academic goals. The department offers Zoom drop-in hours for consulta tions and questions, individual goal-directed counseling with no session limit,  and refers students who need more intensive care to community providers.  Chapman also offers well-being coaching through Wellness and Recreation  and reduced-rate counseling at the Frances Smith Center for Individual and  Family Therapy at just $15 per session. These options are impressive. But,  these resources may not be adequate to solve the looming mental health crisis.  Chapman University’s own SPCS page acknowledges that “SPCS experiences  a high demand for services” and warns of waiting periods for non-emergency  appointments. Even well-resourced counseling centers can face capacity  constraints. Whether or not students know what’s available, when wait times  outlast their willingness to ask for help, they may default to what’s accessible  around the clock: an AI chatbot. According to a US-based think tank RAND’s study published in JAMA Net work Open, about 1 in 8 US adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for  mental health support, especially young adults from 18 to 21 years old. A working paper co-authored by Chapman University’s John Hunter, “AI for  Proactive Mental Health,” tested a purpose-built app called Sunnie on nearly  500 college students and found that “AI-powered apps can proactively prevent  mental health problems, rather than merely react once problems have already  emerged and become acute.” Sunnie isn’t a general-purpose chatbot like Chat GPT or Gemini; it was designed by psychologists as well as students for this  specific purpose. Chapman has the infrastructure to move in this direction as well. The  university’s AI Hub promotes responsible AI use across campus and offers an  asynchronous course teaching the basics of AI tools and their applications in  higher education. Chapman’s GenAI guidelines emphasize accuracy, intellec tual property, security, privacy, and ethical considerations, and encourage  faculty to set clear course-level policies on AI use. That attention to AI govern ance could extend to student wellness. A Chapman-specific mental health tool,  built with clinician oversight and student input, would reach students who  currently fall through the cracks between SPCS office hours and late-night  conversations with ChatGPT. Chapman must also invest in AI literacy. Students need to understand why a  large public language model is not equipped to provide mental health support.  Hallucinated content, privacy violations, and generic responses that lack  clinical grounding can do real harm when a student is in distress. Chapman  should integrate these conversations into orientation programming, wellness  workshops, or existing coursework so students understand the risks before  bad habits form. The mental health crisis on college campuses is not new. What’s new is that  students now have a 24-hour alternative to waiting for a counseling appoint ment, and that alternative was never designed to help them. Universities that  treat mental health support as a checkbox rather than an evolving system will  keep losing students to tools that offer availability without accountability.  Chapman has the counseling foundation, the AI governance structure, and the  institutional values to build something better.  Arush Chandna is the co-founder of Inspira Advantage, a national medical school  admissions consulting firm.