California State University, Bakersfield

What this program actually is

OrientationExperiential and person-of-the-therapist centered — self-awareness, family-of-origin work, live clients and video review — over a broadly integrative theoretical base (behavioral, cognitive, humanistic/experiential, psychodynamic)

The number that reframes everything about this program: it is three years, not two. CSUB's M.S. in Counseling Psychology is "the three-year, 66-semester unit Master of Science in Counseling Psychology Program," and the extra year is not padding — it buys a clean separation between an in-house clinic year and a community-agency year. Year one is coursework only; you cannot touch a client until you have passed all six first-year courses (CPSY 6110, 6120, 6130, 6140, 6310, 6360) and been formally advanced to Graduate Candidacy. Year two is the University Counselor Training Clinic, three afternoons a week on campus. Year three is a community traineeship at 20 hours a week, weekdays, business hours. Almost no other California MFT-track program stages it that way; most compress clinic and field placement into overlapping semesters or skip the in-house stage entirely.

The second distinctive commitment is experiential, and the catalog is unusually blunt about it: "Enrollment in the program implies student consent to engage in individual and group experiential learning activities in various courses." Nine named courses are designated clinical process classes that "are experiential in nature and require the use of live clients and video recording of sessions," and the catalog warns the timetable will show more contact hours than the units imply because of the time needed "to move people from room to room and to change digital recordings." CPSY 6410, Theories of Family Counseling, requires that "students will relate their own family dynamics to the literature" — a family-of-origin assignment written into the course description. The department's own program page says faculty "use experiential learning to teach play therapy & psychodrama." There is also a required 1-unit course, CPSY 5772, on compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, and another required 1-unit orientation course that must be taken in your first semester.

It is the southern Central Valley's program, and that shapes both the clinic and the price. The University Counselor Training Clinic in Education Building Room 200 charges $25 for a first session and $15 after that, and its student managers say plainly that "we don't turn anybody away for lack of payment"; it has run at roughly 80 to 100 clients at a time, offering individual, couple, family and group counseling to Bakersfield residents (not CSUB students, to avoid dual relationships), with every session videotaped and supervised by an LMFT. Practicum sections are capped at six students. The trade-off is scheduling: classes meet between 1 p.m. and 10 p.m., Monday through Thursday, and the program says outright that anyone employed full-time "will likely need to modify their work schedule, especially during years two and three." It is full-time, in-person, cohort-based, fall entry only, and there is no part-time or online route.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

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.

Three years, full-time, in-person, cohort, fall entry only; classes meet between 1 p.m. and 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday. CSUB does not publish a term-by-term grid, so the terms below are built only from what the catalog states explicitly: the six courses required for advancement to Graduate Candidacy are named as the first-year block, and the practicum and traineeship sequences are pinned to years two and three by their prerequisites and by the catalog's scheduling statements. The remaining coursework is listed as unsequenced. Note also that the department's public required-courses page lists 21 courses which sum to 60 units, not 66; the additional 6 units appear to come from CPSY 5771 (1), CPSY 5772 (1), CPSY 6970 Master's Examination (1) and CPSY 5350 Crisis & Trauma Counseling (3), but the catalog does not print a reconciled 66-unit table. Several courses are offered only in alternate years ("Spring Even Year," "Fall Even Year," "Spring Odd Year"), which is part of why the program takes three years. course sequence ↗

66units 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 clinic.  University Counselor Training Clinic Owning a clinic and holding a seat in it are different things, so this sits beside the model above rather than replacing it.

The two clinical years are run on completely different models. Year two is entirely in-house at the University Counselor Training Clinic — nobody hunts for a placement, everyone starts in the same room, sections of CPSY 6810/6820 are capped at six students, and the entry gate is advancement to Graduate Candidacy plus a background check and personal professional liability insurance. The clinic is a real community service: $25 for the first session and $15 thereafter, sliding down or waived for anyone who cannot pay, offering individual, couple, family and group counseling to Bakersfield-area residents but explicitly not to CSUB students, who are directed to the campus counseling center to avoid dual relationships. It has run at roughly 80 to 100 active clients with each trainee carrying about two to three, open Monday through Thursday afternoons and evenings during the school year. Every session is videotaped and supervised by a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and recordings are used for feedback — a practice consistent with the catalog's designation of nine "clinical process classes" that "require the use of live clients and video recording of sessions." The clinic deliberately screens out acute crisis, serious psychiatric disability, domestic violence, suicidality, substance abuse and court-mandated clients, so the year-two caseload is a supported one. Year three flips outward: CPSY 6910 and 6920 are "field placement courses in service providing agencies" chosen "to facilitate the professional goals of the trainee," requiring liability insurance and "placement in an approved setting," at a minimum of 20 hours a week during standard business hours — which is why the program warns that full-time employment is effectively incompatible with years two and three. Site supervisors rate trainee knowledge and skill, and those ratings feed the program's Good Standing determination alongside GPA. source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

The program’s own page →

What it costs

This program does not publish a tuition figure anywhere I could find it. 43 of the 78 on the Board’s list are the same. That is a fair thing to ask admissions directly, and the speed and specificity of the answer tells you something on its own.

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

A grade point average of 3.2 or better in your most recent 60 semester units of academic work source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 76% across 127 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, 88% of this school’s 100 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as California State University, Bakersfield. 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.

• No cohort size published anywhere — not on the program page, the applying page, the catalog or the program description PDF. Only the six-student practicum section cap and a 2019 newspaper reference to "over a dozen student clinicians" give any sense of scale.
• No client-contact hour minimums for either Practicum I/II or Traineeship I/II. The existence of CPSY 6980 Clinical Extension for students who need more than two semesters "to complete the required hours" proves internal targets exist, but they are not published.
• No relational (couple/family) hour sub-minimum published.
• No published term-by-term plan of study. The year-one block is inferable from the advancement-to-candidacy rule and the practicum/traineeship years from course prerequisites, but CSUB publishes no course-sequence grid or plan-of-study PDF.
• The 66-unit total does not reconcile against the department's public required-courses list, which names 21 courses summing to 60 units. The most likely balance is CPSY 5771 (1), 5772 (1), 6970 (1) and 5350 (3), but the 2024 program description states that CPSY 5350 "does not count toward requirements for the MS in Counseling Psychology" while the 2026–27 catalog has dropped that sentence. The composition of the final 6 units is genuinely unclear from published sources.
• The department's own applying page and its 2024 program-description PDF disagree on the year-two clinic window — "1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m." versus "1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m." for three afternoons a week.
• CPSY 6360 has two different published titles: "Techniques of Individual Counseling" in the 2026–27 catalog and "Advanced Counseling Skills" on the department's required-courses page and in its program description.
• The department's clinic and program-handbook pages (university-counselor-training-clinic.shtml, program-handbook.shtml) return 404; the live clinic page is at a different URL and no student handbook PDF was locatable.
• No published licensure-exam pass rate, employment outcomes, or time-to-degree data. Not CACREP- or COAMFTE-accredited, so no annual accreditation report exists.
• No independent student reviews located; Reddit blocked automated retrieval, and Student Doctor Network and The GradCafe had no substantive CSUB threads.
• No high-resolution, clearly-attributed freely-licensed photograph of the Dorothy Donahoe Hall or Education Building exists on Wikimedia Commons. The two Walter W. Stiern Library images there are marked public domain but carry no author or source, and the larger of them is only 1050x596; the campus photo used here is a monument shot from Wiki Loves Monuments 2016.