Antioch University Los Angeles

What this program actually is

OrientationHumanistic/psychodynamic and community-oriented, deliberately eclectic at the core, with a depth/Jungian or LGBT-affirmative center of gravity depending on the specialization chosen

Depth psychology and LGBT-affirmative psychology are Antioch Los Angeles specializations, not Santa Barbara ones. The 2025–2026 university catalog is unambiguous: both the Spiritual and Depth Psychology and the LGBT Affirmative Psychology specialization pages carry the header 'Location: AU Los Angeles', and both sit under the Los Angeles heading in the School of Counseling, Psychology & Therapy program list. The AULA degree is the M.A. in Clinical Psychology (MAP), 90 quarter credits, minimum eight full-time quarters, and it is the degree AULA points MFT candidates toward — the catalog calls it 'the degree for students seeking to be licensed in California as Marriage and Family Therapists and/or Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors (with additional coursework).' The seven Los Angeles specializations in the current catalog are Addiction and Recovery, Applied Community Psychology, Child Studies, General Practice, LGBT Affirmative Psychology, Psychological Trauma Studies, and Spiritual and Depth Psychology; a separate Psychology, Individualized Concentration M.A. is also listed at Los Angeles. Santa Barbara's list is entirely different — Latinx Mental Health and Somatic Psychotherapy. Each AULA specialization occupies exactly the same 17-credit slot in the degree: 14 credits of specialization core plus 3 credits of specialization electives, drawn from the block that non-specializing students spend on free electives. In other words the specialization costs no extra credits — it spends elective credits you were going to spend anyway.

Test the progressive identity against the required course list and it holds up, which is not a given. PSY-5450 Society and the Individual is required of every MAP student in the very first quarter, and the catalog states plainly that 'Passing this class is a prerequisite for advancing to the second quarter in the program' — a hard academic gate on a course about marginalization, privilege, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and physical difference, in which students write a cultural autobiography and 'consider psychotherapy as a social institution.' PSY-5120A Field Study: Psychology and Society is likewise required of all MAP students and sends them out to conduct interviews and field visits in community settings. PSY-5450A Community Psychology: Theories and Methods sits in the required Professional Clinical Issues block. And the degree requires two ten-week courses of the student's own personal psychotherapy — twenty sessions, recorded on the transcript as 'Completed Transcript Requirement.' That combination — a gated first-quarter power-and-privilege course, required community fieldwork, and mandatory personal therapy — is the actual structure behind the reputation, and it is in the core, not the electives.

The trade-off is that the core is deliberately eclectic rather than deep. The catalog says the program 'Prepares eclectically trained students,' and the Advanced Clinical Skills requirement is a single 2-credit course chosen from a menu spanning brief therapy, CBT, DBT, Gestalt, interpersonal process and queer narrative practice — you pick one modality, and the rest become electives. There is no in-house teaching clinic; clinical training happens at what Antioch describes as 'over 100 affiliated mental health services agencies' across Southern California. Tuition runs $956 per credit, so 90 credits is roughly $86,000. Standard time to completion is listed as 48 months. If the depth or LGBT specialization is what you want, that 17-credit block is where the program's distinctiveness actually lives; if you strip the specialization out, what remains is a broad, humanistically-framed, community-oriented MFT curriculum without a single theoretical center of gravity.

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.

Quarter-credit program on a lockstep-ish but flexible schedule: 90 quarter credits over a minimum of 8 full-time quarters, or 16 part-time quarters, with standard time to completion listed as 48 months. Full-time is 8–12 credits per quarter, part-time 4–7. The catalog publishes the degree as functional blocks rather than a term-by-term grid, so the blocks are reproduced below. Specializations do not add credits — they consume the 17-credit elective block as 14 credits of specialization core plus 3 of specialization electives. This is the 2025–2026 University Catalog. course sequence ↗

90 quarter creditsunits 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 school runs its own training clinics.  Antioch Community Therapy Services (ACTS) · Antioch University Counseling Center (AUCC) — now closed Owning a clinic and holding a seat in it are different things, so this sits beside the model above rather than replacing it.

Antioch Los Angeles has no in-house teaching clinic; all clinical training happens in the field, at what the university describes as 'over 100 affiliated mental health services agencies' across Southern California, where students practice therapy under professional supervision. Entry into training is gated rather than automatic: students take PSY-5000 Clinical Training Orientation, then must pass PSY-5000AA Clinical Readiness — a zero-credit course with five prerequisites (Clinical Training Orientation, Process of Interpersonal Psychotherapy I, Assessment of Psychopathology, Professional Ethics and the Law, and Society and the Individual) in which professionalism, receptivity to feedback, a case conceptualization, clinical role-plays and interpersonal skills are all used to judge whether the student may proceed. Placement responsibility is shared rather than assigned: Clinical Readiness explicitly teaches students about 'gathering information about training sites and the application process,' meaning students apply themselves to sites drawn from Antioch's affiliated network, which is why 'mixed' rather than 'program-placed.' Once in the field, the three practicum courses (PSY-6211/6212/6213, plus a 6214 extension if needed) are the in-class companion to the placement and must be taken concurrently with it: the catalog describes PSY-6211 as 'the in-class component of the field-based clinical training experience,' using structured discussion with the instructor to provide academic oversight, supervision utilization, case documentation and case presentation. The published MFT hour floor is 150 direct client contact hours plus 75 more of direct contact and/or client-centered advocacy — noticeably lower than programs that require 300+, because California's BBS allows only a limited number of pre-degree hours to count and Antioch's numbers are the graduation minimum, not the licensure total. Antioch publishes no relational (couple/family) sub-minimum for the MFT track. Specialization students do no extra clinical hours: the Spiritual and Depth Psychology page states that SDP students are expected to apply SDP coursework in their clinical training, 'however, there are no additional SDP clinical training requirements beyond those contained within the MAP degree.' source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

BBS-listed separately for LMFT/LPCC; program specifics not verified in this pass

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.

$956 a unit 2025-26 — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

Awards are determined by prior academic performance (minimum 3.40 GPA) source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 74% across 1,326 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 1,325 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as Antioch University, Los Angeles. 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 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 2026–2027 Antioch catalog (catoid=18) exists and is live, but its program and department listing pages sit behind an AWS WAF challenge that could not be passed. All curriculum, credit and specialization detail here is from the 2025–2026 University Catalog, retrieved partly through the Internet Archive and partly directly. Specialization names, credit counts and course codes should be re-verified against the 2026–2027 edition before publication.
• Antioch's marketing site lists a 'Professional Clinical Counselor (PCC)' specialization among the MA in Clinical Psychology options, but the 2025–2026 catalog does not list PCC as a named specialization at Los Angeles — it appears instead as an additional required-coursework pathway inside the MAP degree (career development, brief therapy, integrative addictions, and program evaluation or evidence-based practice research). Conversely, the catalog lists an 'Applied Community Psychology' specialization at AULA that the marketing site omits. The two sources disagree and I could not reconcile them.
• No cohort size is published anywhere for the MAP program.
• Antioch publishes no relational (couple/family) hours sub-minimum within its MFT clinical training hours, and no per-week hour expectation for the placement.
• Whether individual and group supervision at the placement follow a fixed weekly schedule, and how many supervision hours are required, is not published — the catalog describes supervision only as a topic addressed inside the practicum seminar.
• No verifiable freely-licensed photograph of the Antioch University Los Angeles campus (Culver City) exists on Wikimedia Commons; 'photo' is null rather than a hotlinked university image.
• No credible student discussion (Reddit, GradCafe, Student Doctor Network) could be gathered — the research session's web-search budget was exhausted and direct Reddit API access was blocked. 'voices' is empty rather than absent-because-nothing-exists.