Kaiser Permanente School of Allied Health Sciences

What this program actually is

OrientationIntegrated-health-system training, inside Kaiser Permanente's own mental health clinics

One cohort a year, starting each July, of about twenty to twenty-five students, on a fixed 24-month full-time schedule of eight quarters. There is no part-time or extended track published anywhere in the catalog, which makes this one of the least flexible programs on the Board’s list and one of the most predictable.

Teaching is hybrid and built around people who work: two afternoons or evenings a week, one in person and one online, with the in-person day at Richmond, San Mateo or Lathrop. Clinical hours are the exception and run in normal business hours, which is the scheduling conflict to think through before applying rather than after.

The Lathrop site is inside a working clinic — the Board’s own paperwork names it the Kaiser Permanente Lathrop Mental Health and Wellness Center — and opened to students in July 2026.

The program’s own page →

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renamed this stage from “intern” to “associate” in 2018, so any page still saying “MFT intern” is quoting something out of date.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.  Kaiser Permanente Northern California Mental Health Training Program clinics Owning a clinic and holding a seat in it are different things, so this sits beside the model above rather than replacing it.

Clinical training is hybrid, with at least half the time in person at one of the Kaiser training clinics across Northern California.

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

Run by an integrated health system rather than a university, which shapes almost everything about it. Clinical placements are assigned by the program’s own coordinator inside Kaiser’s Northern California Mental Health Training Program — you are not competing for a site — but Kaiser says its training locations are “currently limited geographically” and warns that students “may be required to travel long distances”. A place in the program is not a job offer either: the post-degree Kaiser fellowship is explicitly not guaranteed. The financing is the other thing to settle early — the school accepts no federal aid at all, no Title IV and no FAFSA, so a $40,000 degree is funded by private loan, an employer, or the Mental Health Scholars Academy scholarship of up to $19,485, which is itself contingent on completing practicum at a Kaiser site.

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.

$38,970 total 2026 — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

No admission test of any kind is required for the counseling programme; the Wonderlic applies only to Medical Assisting and Phlebotomy. source →

admissions page ↗

What people say about it

Nothing credible was found. Searched by every name variant across Reddit, Student Doctor Network and The GradCafe. Silence is not a verdict — small programs generate little discussion — but a missing section should not read as an endorsement, so it says so.

Threads about the decision itself, rather than about one school →

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 catalog cites Business and Professions Code “section 498.36” where the program page correctly says 4980.36. A typo in the catalog, not a different rule.
• The BPPE fact sheet reports a 0% job-placement rate for 2023 and 2024. That is BPPE’s employment definition applied to graduates who are still accruing associate hours, not a finding about whether they found work, and it is not reproduced as an outcome here. On-time completion — 85% and 79% — is the figure that means something.