California State University, San Bernardino

What this program actually is

OrientationScientist-practitioner clinical psychology with a required marriage-and-family therapy skills core; community and public mental health framing rather than a single named theoretical school

Start with the name, because it will confuse you on a program list: this is an M.S. in Clinical/Counseling Psychology awarded by the Psychology department, not a counselor-education or MFT degree, and it is a standard route to the California LMFT. Being housed in psychology rather than education changes the shape of the curriculum. The two skills courses are 6 units each — PSYC 6671 and 6672, Marriage and Family Therapy Skills I and II, each "three hours seminar and three hours recitation" — so a quarter of the entire degree is those two courses. You take a full graduate clinical assessment course (PSYC 6682, "methods of intellectual, diagnostic, and personality assessment with children and adults"), an advanced research-methods course, and, if you choose the thesis, a 4-unit graduate statistics course. What you do not get is breadth: there are no electives, no emphases, no concentrations, and only two systemically-framed courses (PSYC 6667 Family Processes and the MFT Skills sequence).

The thing that actually distinguishes it is the clinic. The Community Counseling Center, established in 1973 and still running on the San Bernardino campus, is where first-year students see their first clients — PSYC 6871 and 6872 are corequisites of the MFT Skills courses, so classroom skills training and live caseload run in the same semester under the same faculty. Supervision is by licensed clinicians from the department itself (currently two licensed psychologists and one LMFT), the clinic director personally does every intake and matches each new client to a therapist and supervisor, and it is a genuine community clinic on a sliding scale — "we often see alumni and friends of family of alumni, but clients do not need any affiliation with CSUSB." It runs fall and spring only, closed over winter break and all summer, with evening hours Monday through Thursday. Second year moves outward: PSYC 6971/6972, Advanced Practicum in Counseling Psychology, is "supervised counseling field work in private or public mental health agencies."

It is small and it is full-time. The department admits "only 10 to 15 students each year," students typically carry 12 to 18 units a semester to finish in two, and there is no part-time, evening or online track. Admission is unusually academic for an MFT-track program: a psychology bachelor's (or a course of study the admissions committee judges equivalent), 3.0 GPA both overall and in the major, five named prerequisites including psychological statistics and research methods, and three letters of which at least two must come from former professors familiar with your scholarly work. If you want a therapy degree and dislike research, look elsewhere; if you want the MFT license as a stepping stone to a PhD, CSUSB says plainly that it "has a track record of preparing students who later enter doctoral programs in clinical or counseling psychology," and offers a thesis option and second-year teaching assistantships to support that.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

Video

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.

Full-time, day-time, two-year lockstep cohort — no part-time, evening or online option. Students "typically take 12 to 18 units per semester" and may register for up to 15 without an overload petition. Core coursework is 57 units and is identical for everyone; the culminating experience is what moves the total, which is why the catalog states a range rather than a number (see corrections). The grid below is the department's own published two-year schedule, marked C for the comprehensive-exam track and T for the thesis track. PSYC 6630 (Teaching of Psychology, 2 units) is an optional extra, required only for students who want a Teaching Associate position in year two. Sequence from the MSCC Graduate Student Handbook; course list and unit values from the 2026–27 catalog. course sequence ↗

60 (comprehensive examination option) or 68 (thesis option)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 school runs its own training clinic.  Community Counseling Center 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 years are structurally different, and that is the thing to understand about this program. Year one is entirely in-house: PSYC 6871 and 6872 are taken as corequisites of the 6-unit MFT Skills courses and are served at the department's own Community Counseling Center, so nobody has to go find a placement and everybody starts on the same footing in semester one. The Center is a real low-cost community clinic on a sliding-scale fee, open to San Bernardino-area residents with no CSUSB affiliation, and explicitly not to current CSUSB students (they go to campus CAPS instead). Clients typically meet their counselor weekly for 50 minutes and "the length of counseling is not limited; if advisable, clients may begin in August and continue until mid-May when the Center closes for the summer" — so trainees can carry a case for most of an academic year, but the clinic shuts for winter break and all summer, which caps how fast hours accumulate. Supervision is by licensed departmental faculty (currently two licensed psychologists and one LMFT), and clinic director Dr. Stacy Forcino conducts every intake herself and "will match new clients with a therapist and supervisor who can best meet their needs." The clinic screens out the hardest cases by design: no ongoing violence or abuse, no active suicidality, eating disorders, serious mental illness or current substance problems, and no minors where parental involvement would be inappropriate. Year two is the opposite model — PSYC 6971/6972 is "supervised counseling field work in private or public mental health agencies," i.e. an outside placement, run through a Field Liaison, Field Instructor and Director of Field Education, and some second-year internships pay a stipend. A grade of "No Credit" in advanced practicum requires repeating that semester of field placement and puts you on probation; a second one can end the program. 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 minimum cumulative undergraduate grade point average of 3.0 source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 86% across 71 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, 95% of this school’s 77 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as California State University, San Bernardino. 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 published client-contact hour minimums. Nothing on the catalog page, the department pages, the clinic pages or the MSCC Graduate Student Handbook states how many face-to-face hours the clinic practicum or the advanced practicum requires, and no relational (couple/family) sub-minimum is given anywhere.
• No application deadline is published on the department's admissions page or in the catalog.
• No applicant volume or admit rate — only the 10-to-15 cohort size.
• No published licensure-exam pass rate, employment outcomes or time-to-degree data. The program is not CACREP- or COAMFTE-accredited, so no annual accreditation report of the kind SFSU publishes exists.
• The department's admissions page describes the degree as "a 63-71 semester-unit program," contradicting both the 2026–27 catalog and its own student handbook, which say 60–68. See corrections.
• The most recent MSCC Graduate Student Handbook posted publicly is the 2022 edition; its two-year grid is dated 2022–23 / 2023–24.
• The clinic's sliding-scale fee range is not published, only the phrase "low-cost" and "sliding scale fee schedule."
• No independent student reviews located. Reddit blocked automated retrieval and Student Doctor Network and The GradCafe had no substantive CSUSB threads.