Golden Gate University

What this program actually is

OrientationPsychodynamic/relational depth — explicitly anti-symptom-reduction, partnered with the Psychotherapy Action Network, with a required personal-psychotherapy component; recently overlaid with an institutional push on AI in clinical practice

Golden Gate University is a business, tax and law school that also runs a small psychotherapy program, and the proportions matter. In the 2022-23 IPEDS reporting year GGU conferred 758 degrees: 480 in business, 117 JDs, and 65 across all of psychology at every level — of which 26 were master's. The MA in Counseling Psychology is therefore not a large operation inside a psychology-first institution; it is a niche program inside a career-focused school built for working adults, with all the trade-offs that implies. It is also newly reorganized. GGU stood up a School of Psychology with a Founding Dean, Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA — the FIPA is a Fellowship of the International Psychoanalytical Association — describing it as "built on more than a decade of psychology education at GGU." The counseling program itself is older than the school that now houses it: an archived version of its page from April 2019 shows the same 60 units, the same Psychotherapy Action Network partnership, and tuition of $1,050 per unit against today's $1,090.

What genuinely distinguishes this program is that it is psychodynamic and says so, which in the California online market is close to unique. Its strategic partner is the Psychotherapy Action Network, an advocacy organization whose entire purpose is to defend depth-oriented therapy against symptom-focused models, and the program's own site-selection criteria commit to it in writing: "We believe that psychotherapy must acknowledge the complexity of the individual and the uniqueness of individual suffering, rather than the identification and resolution of discrete symptoms." You can see this in the unit weightings. PSYCH 323 Psychodynamic Models of Counseling gets a full three units. PSYCH 336 Evidence-Based Practice Treatment gets one. And 50 hours of personal psychotherapy with a licensed clinician are a degree requirement, not a recommendation — the department maintains a sliding-scale referral list in an appendix of the student handbook, and there is a formal waiver form if the cost is unmanageable. Almost no other online-delivered California program requires you to be in therapy yourself.

Layered on top of that, awkwardly, is a hard pivot toward artificial intelligence. The program's published learning outcomes now include "Critically evaluate and ethically integrate artificial intelligence and digital technologies in clinical practice," the directed-elective list opens with AI 300 Applied AI and Agents: From Tools to Intelligent Systems — a course about building and deploying AI agents, prompt design and low-code prototyping — and the new School of Psychology runs a "human systems lab" whose projects include "ethical AI guidance for clinical environments." Whether a psychoanalytically-inflected counseling degree and a course on deploying AI agents belong in the same 60 units is a fair question to put to the program director. The other thing to weigh honestly: GGU is not COAMFTE- or CACREP-accredited and publishes no graduation rate, no licensure rate, no job placement rate and no exam pass rate. There is no external accreditor forcing those numbers into daylight, and the program has not volunteered them.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

Information session

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.

60 units, no published term-by-term sequence — GGU lists the whole requirement as a single 'Directed Electives – 60 units' block, so the list below is the full required-course set rather than a term grid. GGU runs on trimesters with three entry points (Fall, Spring, Summer) and no cohort. Two formats: fully online asynchronous (no residency) or hybrid, which adds two designated campus weeks per trimester at the San Francisco Mission Street campus; students may mix formats within a term. Full-time students are advertised to finish in under 2.5 years. Undergraduate PSYCH 102 and PSYCH 120 taken at GGU carry internal transfer credit toward PSYCH 302 and PSYCH 320 respectively. course sequence ↗

60units 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 →

GGU is explicit and unusually candid: "While it is your responsibility to find a traineeship, we are committed to assisting you during each step of the process." That assistance is more concrete than most online programs offer — a named Psychology Department Traineeship Coordinator maintains a Traineeship and Internship Sites spreadsheet, Career Services runs CV and interview preparation, and the handbook tells you plainly that "most students apply to 5 – 7 traineeship sites," which is the kind of calibrating detail schools rarely publish. The gate is Traineeship Candidacy, a formal status assessing "academic and emotional preparedness": a Candidacy form goes to the Department Chair alongside faculty feedback and any atypical reports, and if there are concerns a Candidacy Committee of at least two faculty convenes, can require an in-person meeting, and in rare cases can require a student to leave the program — and the same committee re-evaluates you if a placement is ever terminated. Every site must be approved by the Department Chair with a written agreement covering both parties' responsibilities, plus a Supervised Fieldwork Agreement and BBS Form 37A-523; supervision is by an on-site licensed supervisor, hours are logged in Time2Track, and proof of student liability insurance is required at registration. There is no in-house training clinic — placements are at county and community mental health agencies, outpatient clinics, psychiatric hospitals, schools, residential and chemical-dependency programs — but there is a partial substitute in "an on-campus clinical case conference led by one of our professors" running alongside the PSYCH 394 seminar, which is conducted synchronously by Zoom even for otherwise-asynchronous students. Two practical warnings the handbook gives that most do not: traineeship schedules are usually non-negotiable and "for most placements, you will need to be available 2 – 3 full days each week, for around 20 hours of work in total"; and to do a practicum at all you must be physically located in a state where GGU is authorized to operate. source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

Requires 300 face-to-face clinical hours plus a 50-hour personal psychotherapy requirement

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.

$1,090 a unit — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

No GMAT or GRE Required source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 54% across 116 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, 69% of this school’s 85 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as Golden Gate University. 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.

• When the counseling program started could not be pinned down. GGU's new School of Psychology page says it is "built on more than a decade of psychology education at GGU" but gives no founding year, and the school's Dean is described as a Founding Dean, meaning the school (not the program) is new. The oldest hard evidence found is an Internet Archive capture from 2 April 2019 of ggu.edu/degrees-and-courses/psychology/master-of-arts-in-counseling-psychology, already showing 60 units, the PsiAN partnership and MFT and I-O concentrations. Confusingly, IPEDS completions data shows no psychology master's degrees conferred at GGU in any year sampled from 2016 through 2022, with the first appearing in 2023 (26 awards under CIP 42.0101) — either the program graduated its first substantial group very recently, or GGU reported these degrees under a non-psychology CIP before 2023. This should be confirmed with the program director.
• Program size is inferable but not published. The best available proxies are IPEDS completions (26 psychology master's in 2022-23) and College Scorecard (52 awards in CIP 42.28 over two years). GGU does not publish enrollment for the program.
• No graduation rate, licensure rate, job placement rate or licensure-exam pass rate is published. The program is not COAMFTE- or CACREP-accredited, so no accreditor compels disclosure. This is the single largest information gap of the three programs researched.
• The program page and the Psychology Student Handbook disagree on the practicum unit requirement: the page says "a total of 6 units of PSYCH 394... across three academic terms" while the handbook says "Students are required to complete 9 units of Psych 394 before graduation." The 2019 archived page also said 9 units. Confirm which applies to your entry term.
• GGU's Acalog catalog (catalog.ggu.edu) could not be navigated from this environment — its section pages returned empty without a browser session, so the course descriptions used here come from GGU's public per-course pages rather than the catalog proper.
• Median federal graduate debt is suppressed in the College Scorecard for this program (only the average, $50,493, is released, on a cohort of 18), so a like-for-like median comparison with the other two programs is not possible.
• No first-person student discussion could be retrieved. Reddit (direct and via mirrors), Niche, GradReports and Trustpilot were all unreachable from this environment, and the web-search budget was exhausted before forum sources could be gathered.
• The total-cost figure is approximate. GGU publishes $1,090 per unit, which multiplies to $65,400 over 60 units, but does not publish a program total; an independent directory computes roughly $65,000 from a flat full-time trimester rate of $13,080, so the two methods agree closely.