What this program actually is
OrientationSchool-Based Family Counseling — family-systems practice applied jointly to the home and the school, with an explicit social-justice and urban-Los Angeles framing ("a specific emphasis in training our students to become culturally competent, social justice oriented counselors").
This is not really an MFT program with a school-counseling flavor; it is two credentials welded together, and you cannot buy them separately. A graduate leaves with four things: the M.S. in Counseling, the Pupil Personnel Services (PPS) Credential in School Counseling, the Advanced Authorization in Child Welfare and Attendance (CWA), and eligibility for both the LMFT and the LPCC. The program's own framing is that "MFTs are better therapists when they understand how to assist their clients in navigating and succeeding within the school system," and School-Based Family Counseling as a discipline treats school and family as "inextricably interconnected systems." The CWA authorization is the least familiar piece: it qualifies you for the school jobs that deal with attendance, truancy, foster and homeless youth and welfare referrals. If that combination is what you want, there is no other California program that packages it this way and this is a genuinely unusual, well-defined thing to be.
If you only want the LMFT, the honest answer is that you should not be here. The degree is 73–77 units against the BBS's 60-unit floor, and four courses in the required list exist because of the school credential rather than the license: Disability in Schools and Society (3, listed as EDSP 5000 on the 2019 flyer and as COUN 5004 on the current roadmap), COUN 5257 Career Education and Guidance in Schools (3), COUN 5281 Seminar: Leadership in Pupil Personnel Services (3), and COUN 5286 Supervised Field Experience in School Counseling including the CWA requirements (6). That is fifteen units — strip them and you are left with 58, which is to say a conventional 60-unit MFT curriculum. The credential also drags in its own compliance work: a Certificate of Clearance from the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in your first semester and the CBEST basic-skills requirement, which you must pass to move from conditional to full admission. And the fieldwork doubles: COUN 5289 (MFT site practicum) and COUN 5286 (school and CWA) are listed as parallel options every semester of years two and three, so students commonly carry a clinical placement and a school placement at once, 15–20 hours a week. Sacramento State, which offers PPS as a separate post-graduate track, prices that credential at 15 units too — the number is not unreasonable, it is just fifteen units you have no use for if you never intend to work in a school. The FAQ closes the reverse door as well: "we do not offer a PPS credential only program. We do not offer a CWA only Program." No MFT-only variant is described anywhere on the program's pages.
The logistics are unusually restrictive and unusually clearly stated. Full-time and cohorted, in person, evenings: classes run 4:30–7:15pm and 7:30–10:10pm, two to four days a week, and "Students need to be living in the Los Angeles area in order to start the program. There is NO on-line option for this program." Two cohorts of twelve are admitted once a year for fall, from roughly 300 applications, and clinical class sizes stay at twelve. First-year students train in the School-Based Family Clinic in King Hall C-1067, an on-campus clinic offering free counseling to the surrounding community in English and Spanish, Mondays to Thursdays; you work in co-therapy pairs under direct supervision by licensed faculty, recording and reviewing sessions, starting in the first semester with shadowing, peer counseling and role plays. On cost, treat the program's own figure with care: the FAQ's $24,380 total is built on "$4200 per semester" full-time and "$2800 per semester" part-time, but Cal State LA's published Fall 2026 rate is $4,821.04 full-time (6.1+ units) and $3,027.04 part-time for California residents. Rerunning the program's own formula at those rates gives roughly $27,300 rather than $24,380.
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.
Family Counseling Laboratory Fieldwork
Taken twice, in the fall and spring of the first year, meeting in the on-campus School-Based Family Clinic. The programme states: "During the first and second semesters of your first year, you will complete the majority of your practicum hours in this clinic... you and a co-therapist will assist parents and their children with issues that range from school behavioral problems to family separation issues."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingVery few California programs put students in front of real families in the first semester of the first year, and fewer still do it as co-therapy pairs in a faculty-supervised university clinic with recording equipment. It is the strongest argument for the program: the clinical exposure front-loads, so by the time you go out to a community site in year two you have already carried families under direct observation rather than only role-played.
Supervised Field Experience in School Counseling (Includes requirements for Child Welfare and Attendance Services)
The school-side fieldwork strand, listed on the programme flyer with the parenthetical "(Includes requirements for Child Welfare and Attendance Services)", and scheduled on the roadmap as an option in every fieldwork semester from the fall of year two through the spring of year three.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the course that turns the degree into a credential and the six units you are paying for if you only want the license. It is also the mechanism by which the CWA authorization is earned rather than merely offered. Because it runs in parallel with COUN 5289, a student in year two is typically placed in a K–12 school and a clinical agency simultaneously.
Site Practicum in Marriage, Family, & Child Counseling
The clinical fieldwork strand, listed on the flyer with the legacy title "Marriage, Family, & Child Counseling" and scheduled on the roadmap in every fieldwork semester of years two and three, with weekly supervision slots on Mondays (4:45, 6:00 or 7:15pm) or Wednesdays (3:00–4:15pm).catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingTwo things a prospective student should read off this entry. First, the course title still uses California's pre-1999 MFCC language, which is a small sign of how long the curriculum documents have gone without a rewrite. Second, the supervision slots are fixed and evening — combined with 15–20 hours a week of fieldwork, this is why the program warns that "full-time employment is often not possible."
Seminar: Leadership in Pupil Personnel Services
Required course in the 36-unit block, taken in the fall of the second year (Wednesdays 7:25–10:10pm on the current roadmap). It is one of the four school-credential courses that sit outside a standard MFT curriculum. catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingIncluded here not because it is appealing but because it is diagnostic: a leadership seminar in pupil personnel services is a school-administration course, not a clinical one. If the description of that course makes you impatient, this is the wrong program — three more like it are required, and they are the reason for the 73–77 unit total.
Trauma and Crisis Counseling
Appears only on the current course roadmap, in the fall of the third year, flagged "(Optional for LPCC only)." It does not appear on the programme flyer's required course list.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the hidden price of the LPCC. The program's FAQ says plainly "Does this program also prepare students for the LPCC... Yes, it does," but the roadmap shows it costs an extra three-unit course beyond the 73–77, taken in a year when most students have no other coursework. Worth raising with an adviser before assuming dual eligibility is free here.
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.
Full-time, cohorted, lockstep, 2.5–3 years, fall entry only; four to five courses a semester in the first two years plus a summer term, then fieldwork. Two documents describe the curriculum and they do not entirely agree: the program flyer (effective Fall 2019) gives the unit blocks — core 19, required courses 36, fieldwork 18, culminating experience 0–4, total 73–77 — while a separate line on the same flyer says 76–80. The term-by-term grid below is the program's current roadmap (last revised 21 April 2025), which uses some renumbered codes (Disability in Schools and Society is EDSP 5000 on the flyer and COUN 5004 on the roadmap; the comprehensive exam is COUN 5960 on the flyer and 5096 on the roadmap). Meeting times are the roadmap's own and are subject to change. course sequence ↗
73–77units in total
- A course in Counseling or Psychological Theories — COUN 4500 Counseling Theories is offered at Cal State LA the summer before the program starts; waived if you hold a psychology degree
- COUN 5000 Lifespan Development (3) — Mon 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5103 Multicultural Counseling (3) — Mon 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5005 Counseling Strategies (4) — Tue or Thu 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5230 Family Counseling Lab (3) — Tue or Thu 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5200 Intro to Family Evaluation and Counseling (3) — Wed 4:30–7:15pm
- Also this term: apply for the Certificate of Clearance with the CTC, student liability insurance, and complete the CBEST basic-skills requirement
- COUN 5004 Disability in Schools and Society (3) — Mon 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5160 Group Counseling (3) — Mon 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5210 Advanced Family and Marriage Counseling (3) — Wed 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5220 Family Counseling with Children (3) — Tue or Thu 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5230 Family Counseling Lab, second semester (3) — Tue or Thu 7:25–10:10pm
- Also this term: apply for Advancement to Candidacy; attend the Fieldwork Placement Fair in February; interview and secure your own fieldwork site
- COUN 4030 Child Maltreatment and Domestic Violence (3) — Tue 5:00–9:00pm
- COUN 5001 Law & Ethics in Counseling (3) — Wed 5:00–9:00pm
- Note: the FAQ describes the summer term as taken through Open University at a per-class rate rather than the full-time semester rate
- COUN 5111 Diagnosis and Treatment in Clinical Counseling (3) — Wed 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5281 Leadership in PPS (3) — Wed 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5002 Assessment in Counseling (3) — Tue 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5650 Addiction Counseling (3) — Tue 7:25–10:10pm
- Fieldwork options: COUN 5289 MFT Fieldwork (3) and/or COUN 5286 School Counseling PPS & CWA Fieldwork (3)
- COUN 5003 Principles of Research and Program Evaluation (3) — Tue 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5257 Career Education and Guidance in Schools (3) — Tue 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5112 Psychopharmacology (3) — Thu 4:30–7:15pm
- COUN 5252 Counseling and Human Sexuality (3) — Thu 7:25–10:10pm
- COUN 5096 COMPS (0, optional this term)
- Fieldwork options: COUN 5289 (3) and/or COUN 5286 (3)
- COUN 5096 COMPS (0, optional)
- COUN 4330 Trauma and Crisis Counseling (3) — "Optional for LPCC only"
- Fieldwork options: COUN 5289 (3) and/or COUN 5286 (3)
- Also this term: apply for spring graduation and for the PPS Credential
- "No coursework, only Fieldwork Supervision"
- Fieldwork options: COUN 5289 (3) and/or COUN 5286 (3)
- Then: "Apply for AMFT and APCC with the BBS if working toward licensure hours within the next year."
- COUN 5960 Comprehensive Examination (0) — what most students do
- or COUN 5990A Thesis Planning (2) + COUN 5990B Thesis (2)
- or COUN 5995A Project Planning (2) + COUN 5995B Project (2)
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 does not say
Nothing on this school’s published pages states who secures your placement. That is not the same as a bad answer - but it is the first question to ask admissions, and the specificity of the reply tells you a great deal. Thirty of the seventy-eight are in this position.
These Clinic courses provide the opportunity for students to work in the Cal State LA's School-Based Family Counseling Clinic with families from the community who are referred for family and school-related problems. Students work in co-therapy teams under the direct supervision of licensed faculty members. the school’s own page →
The school runs its own training clinic. School-Based Family 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 first year is the school's to run and the last two are yours. From the first semester you are in the School-Based Family Clinic in King Hall — shadowing, peer counseling and role plays at first, using the clinic's recording equipment to review your own work, "closely supervised by faculty members" — and by the second semester you are carrying real cases with a co-therapist, working with parents and children on problems ranging from school behavior to family separation. The clinic is free to the surrounding community, runs Monday to Thursday, and offers services in English and Spanish; its clinicians are described as advanced graduate students supervised directly by licensed Counseling faculty in the Charter College of Education. The handover happens in February of year one, at a fieldwork placement fair, and after that the program is explicit that it does not place you: "Not directly. We provide a fieldwork placement fair the year before you begin fieldwork. We also maintain a list of agencies and schools with which we have a current fieldwork contract. You are responsible for finding the school and/or agency that feels like the right fit for you." The stated rationale is that fieldwork is "a bridge to employment" and that many students are hired by their sites. From then on the structure is two parallel tracks — COUN 5289 for MFT hours and COUN 5286 for school counseling and CWA hours — each appearing as an option in every fieldwork semester, with fixed weekly supervision slots on Monday and Wednesday evenings, and a separate application for fieldwork enrollment filed the semester before. Fifteen to twenty hours a week of placement, on top of evening classes, is why the program says outside employment is possible but "full-time employment is often not possible." source ↗
Will this degree travel
Not COAMFTE accredited
That is not a defect — 66 of the 78 institutions on the Board’s list are in the same position, including most of the Cal States, and their graduates license in California every year.
It becomes a problem if you leave. Several states will not accept a non-COAMFTE degree without remedial coursework, and a few will not accept it at all. If there is any chance you move, check the destination board’s rules before you enroll, not after.
What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →
What it is, on paper
Also yields school-counseling credentials; requires LA-area residence
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
No specific undergraduate major is required nor is a standardized test (e.g., GRE) required. source →
How its graduates did on the Board’s exam
Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 71% across 182 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, 81% of this school’s 149 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.
Recorded by the Board as California State 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.
What this number is, and what it is not
It describes candidates, not teaching. In 2022 the Council on Social Work Education removed licensing-exam pass rates from its accreditation standards, saying the data “may not be an equitable measure of program outcomes” — after the social-work exam board’s own analysis found first-time pass rates of 84% for white candidates and 45% for Black candidates. A program that enrolls more career-changers and more students of color will post a lower rate while teaching at least as well. The accrediting body with the most reason to want this metric examined it and stopped using it.
The denominator is not this year’s students. These are people who sat the exam during the window, often several years after graduating and sometimes after the program changed shape or owner.
It is published here because it is a real, official figure that is otherwise almost impossible to find — and it is published on this page only. There is no pass-rate column in the directory, nothing is sorted by it, and no school on this site is ranked against another.
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.
The single question that separates programs. Ask for a list of current sites, and ask plainly whether the program places you or expects you to find your own. A rural or online student unable to find a site cannot graduate.
The Board publishes this by school, so the program cannot be the only source. Ask anyway, and see whether the answer matches.
Per-unit rates move. Multiply by the actual unit count and add campus fees before comparing anything.
The 500 couples-and-families hours are carved out of the 1,750 clinical ones, and they are the category associates most often finish short on. A program placing students in adult individual settings will not generate them.
Sometimes yes, sometimes with extra units, sometimes only in one delivery format. Get it in writing rather than from a brochure.
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 Cal State LA academic catalog (ecatalog.calstatela.edu) sits behind an AWS WAF bot challenge and could not be fetched, so no official catalog course descriptions were obtained. Every course code, title and unit value here comes from the program's own flyer PDF and its current course roadmap; where a description is given it is drawn from those documents or the clinic page, never from the catalog.
- The two curriculum documents disagree in places. The flyer says "73-77 units" in its total row but "76-80 units" in the paragraph above it; Disability in Schools and Society is EDSP 5000 on the flyer and COUN 5004 on the roadmap; the comprehensive exam is COUN 5960 on the flyer and 5096 on the roadmap. The flyer is dated "Effective Fall 2019" and "Revised 01/2019"; the roadmap was revised 21 April 2025.
- No total client-contact-hour requirement is published for any fieldwork course, and no relational (couple/family) hour sub-minimum. Field time is quantified only as "15-20 hours per week" in years two and three.
- The split between the school and MFT fieldwork strands is not fully specified: COUN 5289 and COUN 5286 are listed as "fieldwork options" every semester without a rule for how many of each a student must take, so the 18-unit fieldwork block cannot be allocated with certainty.
- The program does not state anywhere whether the four school-credential courses can be dropped by a student who wants only the LMFT. It says only that PPS-only and CWA-only routes do not exist; the reverse question is unanswered on its pages.
- The cost figures on the SBFC FAQ are stale — they use $4,200 per full-time semester and $2,800 part-time against a published Fall 2026 rate of $4,821.04 and $3,027.04. The $990-per-class summer Open University rate could not be independently confirmed.
- The SBFC site's application-process page still shows a January 2021 deadline; the deadline used here is the one on the official calstatela.edu program page.
- Nothing credible was found in student discussion forums. Reddit search endpoints were unreachable during this pass, and an earlier survey of r/therapists, r/askatherapist, r/psychologystudents, The GradCafe and Student Doctor Network found no Cal State LA SBFC thread worth citing. The voices above are all from the program's own documents.
Sources for this page (8)
- M.S. in Counseling: Option in School-Based Family Counseling — official program page
- SBFC program site — Program Information (units, clinic, schedule, employment)
- SBFC program site — FAQs (cost, cohort size, fieldwork placement, LPCC)
- SBFC Program Roadmap: Course Sequence & Advisement (Google Doc, revised 21 April 2025)
- MS Counseling / School-Based Family Counseling program flyer (PDF, effective Fall 2019) — unit blocks and course list
- School-Based Family Clinic — Charter College of Education
- Student Fees — Fall Semester 2026 tuition and fees
- SBFC program site — Course Sequence page