Alliant International University (CSPP)

What this program actually is

OrientationSystemic / relational couple and family therapy — explicitly model-based, taught as an integration of the major schools of family therapy

Alliant's Couple and Family Therapy program is one program run in five places — San Diego, Irvine, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Online — and the 2025–26 program manual states flatly that all five "share the same curriculum, degree requirements, policies, and procedures." What the manual does not say, and what the COAMFTE-required disclosure data does, is how lopsided the five are. Entering MA cohorts on the ground run 13 to 43 students per campus per year; the online branch enrolled 111 to 190 per year over the same period. So the modal Alliant MFT student is an online student in a cohort roughly ten times the size of the Sacramento or Irvine class. The same disclosures show the tradeoff honestly: on-ground graduation-in-advertised-time rates run 55–95% depending on campus and year, the online rate runs 48–69%, while licensure rates sit at 87–100% across all of them.

The thing that most concretely distinguishes an Alliant trainee from a graduate of a BBS-only California program is COAMFTE accreditation, which the MA and PsyD hold and the PhD is still seeking. Because of it, the practicum requires 300 direct client contact hours of which at least 150 must be relational — couples or families, not individuals — plus 100 hours of supervision, at least 50 of it based on direct observation or audio/video recording. California's BBS imposes no relational-hours floor, so this shapes the caseload you have to negotiate for and the sites that will work. Alliant tells students to watch the ratio and keep relational-to-individual hours near 1:1. The systemic identity is not just accreditation paperwork, either: past CFT faculty included Jay Haley, James Framo, Virginia Satir, Carl Whitaker and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, and Susan Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, is currently affiliated with the program. The curriculum reflects it — two semesters of systemic theory, each paired with a separate one-unit skills lab as a co-requisite (63120 with 63130, then 63220 with 63230), with the second semester moving into postmodernism and social constructionism plus "several empirically based models that private and public agencies are using across the state of California."

The criticism is real and worth stating with numbers rather than adjectives. Alliant converted from nonprofit to a for-profit benefit corporation in February 2015 under Arist Education System, a Bertelsmann subsidiary, and rebranded as "Alliant University" in January 2026. On-ground MA tuition is $1,463 per unit for 2026–27 and online is $1,135 — 60 units works out to roughly $87,800 on campus and $68,100 online, which is the reverse of USC, where both modalities cost the same. Federal College Scorecard data for Alliant–San Diego master's completers in the mental-health-services field show median federal graduate loan debt of $107,070 against median earnings of $53,383 one year after graduating. Student reviews are genuinely split, and the split is informative: the MFT-specific reviews on GradReports are positive ("the professors seem to care a lot... extremely culturally diverse and social justice oriented"), while the most damning reviews on that same page come from other Alliant programs — Clinical Counseling, School Psychology, Education — calling the school a "degree mill" with "minimal to nonexistent" instruction. If you are evaluating this program, do not average those together; they are describing different departments.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

Program overview

The courses that define it

Every California program teaches law and ethics, assessment and a survey of theories. These are the courses that are not on every list — the ones that tell you what this particular faculty believes therapy is. The quoted text is the catalog’s own; the note underneath each one is mine.

The whole degree, term by term

What you would actually take, in the order you would take it. Sequences change; check the current catalog before you count on any single term.

Cohort model, six semesters over two full years (part-time plans run 3–4 years; the maximum time limit is 5 years). All campuses and the online branch follow the same Master Plan of Study. Fall and spring semesters are 15 weeks, summers 10 weeks. 57 core units plus one 3-unit elective; graduation also requires passing a comprehensive exam in May of the second year and logging 50 professional development hours, up to 25 of which may be personal therapy. course sequence ↗

60 (57 core + 3 elective)units in total

How practicum actually works

Californian clinical training runs in two legally distinct stages, and the difference decides what a program can and cannot do for you.

A trainee is a student. You see clients while still enrolled, at a site your program approves, supervised by someone the site provides. This is practicum, and it is the stage a program controls. An associate — registered with the Board after you graduate — is no longer a student, is usually paid, and is working toward the 3,000 hours the license requires. The Board renamed this stage from “intern” to “associate” in 2018, so any page still saying “MFT intern” is quoting something out of date.

Hours you bank as a trainee count toward the 3,000, up to a limit, which is why the size and quality of a program’s placement matters long after graduation: a student who leaves with 1,000 hours starts the associate years a third of the way through them, and one who leaves with the 225-hour minimum starts at the beginning.

Practicum is also where a degree most often stops being on schedule. Coursework runs on a calendar the school controls; placement does not. The questions that matter are therefore all about who owns the problem of finding you a site — and the answer differs enormously between programs on this list.

What happens after the degree →

The Clinical Training Manual states it plainly: "As a student of the CFT program, you are fully responsible in securing your practicum site." Each campus has a Clinical Training Coordinator who approves sites and hours, and there is an approved-site list plus a Practicum Site Qualification Checklist, but you interview and get hired. Final approval requires malpractice insurance, current AAMFT membership, a signed agency agreement from all parties, and a signed acknowledgement of the manual — missing any one gets you dropped from PSY73600. Supervision is doubled up: weekly face-to-face (Zoom for online students) with an Alliant faculty member in the practicum class, plus weekly supervision from your on-site supervisor. A critical constraint for online students: "You must obtain a site in the State in which you reside, even if that site is telehealth. Your site and your clients must be located in your State of current residence." source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

300 direct client contact hours, 100 supervision hours; largest COAMFTE footprint in CA

The program’s own page →

What it costs

The figure below is the institution’s own, from its own page, with the year it applies to. Multiply the per-unit rate by the actual unit count and add campus fees before comparing it with anything.

$1,463 a unit 2026-27 — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale unless otherwise stated source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 81% across 690 sittings here, against 66% statewide. First attempts are the fairer comparison — counting resits measures how many tries people needed rather than how many passed, and it penalises a school whose graduates keep going.

On the separate California Law and Ethics exam, 83% of this school’s 736 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as Alliant International University (aka CSPP) · Alliant International University (aka US International). Its list is kept by institution and its names lag: a school that has since renamed appears under the name it had when the candidates sat.

July 2018 - December 2024, pooled (13 semiannual BBS reports) · the Board’s published exam results by school →

What the accreditor makes it publish

In the school’s own words, this counts: “Licensure rate is the percentage of graduates from the cohort year that have achieved ANY level of MFT licensure. ... Alliant MFT Notes: Licensure rates include any graduate who achieves ANY level of postgraduate MFT licensure (e.g. associate, provisional, or registered, as applicable per jurisdiction).” — which is worth reading before the numbers, because it is rarely what the column heading suggests.

Irvine / FT

Los Angeles / FT

Online / FT

Sacramento / FT

San Diego / FT

Graduation is measured against each school’s own advertised length, which across the twelve accredited programs runs from two years to four and a half — so a low figure often means students chose a longer track rather than that they did not finish. Licensure and placement are usually shares of the graduates who answered a survey, not of the cohort. Both are reasons these numbers describe one program over time and cannot be set against another school’s.

The school’s own disclosure → · most recent 5 cohorts shown

What people say about it

Quoted where the wording carries the meaning, linked in every case, opening in a new window. The tags are my reading of each source, not a measurement, and the unflattering ones are here too.

What to ask before you apply

None of these are answered on a program page, and all five change what the degree is actually worth to you.

What I could not establish

Everything above is sourced. These are the things I looked for and could not establish - take them to admissions, and note how quickly and precisely they answer.

• The URL given in the assignment (alliant.edu/california-school-professional-psychology/marital-family-therapy-ma) returns 404. The live program pages are at alliant.edu/psychology/marital-and-family-therapy/ma and .../ma/curriculum.
• Alliant's current 2025–26 catalog is behind an AWS bot challenge — preview_program.php and content.php both return an empty challenge page. Course descriptions quoted here come from Alliant's own archived 2022–23 catalog entries, which are still served. Two courses in the current plan of study have changed since then: PSY63173 Parent-Child Therapy is now 3 units (was PSY63170, 2 units) and PSY67562 Psychopharmacology is now 2 units (was PSY67560, 3 units). No current description could be retrieved for either.
• Irvine is listed on the COAMFTE disclosure pages and in the program manual, but the MA program page's 'Program Offered In' box lists only Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Online. Could not resolve whether Irvine is still taking new MA students; the Irvine cohort data shows 15 entering in 2024–25 and 19 in 2025–26.
• The PhD in MFT is described in the 2025–26 manual as "currently in the process of seeking COAMFTE accreditation." The MA and PsyD are accredited.
• No in-house training clinic could be confirmed. The program manual and an older catalog both reference community-based clinics, but no named Alliant-operated MFT clinic exists in current materials.
• No MFT-specific GRE policy, GPA cutoff, admit rate or prerequisite coursework list is published; only Alliant's general graduate requirements.
• College Scorecard reports at the 4-digit CIP level (51.15) and by campus, so the $107,070 median debt figure covers Alliant–San Diego master's completers across mental-health-services programs, not the MFT MA alone.
• Reddit could not be searched from this environment (blocked), so the discussion sources here are GradReports, Student Doctor Network and Alliant's own disclosures.