What this program actually is
OrientationDepth/imaginal and transformative-learning, with somatic and expressive-arts elective tracks
Meridian is a small, mostly-doctoral, WSCUC-accredited graduate school whose entire curriculum is built on a house pedagogy it calls Transformative Learning and, inside that, a method it calls the Imaginal Process. This is not branding laid over a conventional syllabus: the first required course, ANC 101, introduces the Imaginal Process directly, in which "human capacities are cultivated through diversifying, deepening, embodying, and personalizing experience," and the same sensibility runs through the licensure courses. The BBS substance-abuse requirement is met by PSY 530 Ecstatic States of Culture, which frames addiction through "myth, current psychological models, and our own experience" and "the human need for ecstatic experience." The law-and-ethics content area is met partly by PSY 525 Career Development, which opens on Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss" and doubles as the course where students design their fieldwork plan. Psychopathology is taught to cover the DSM-5 "without succumbing to the diagnostic illusions of the medical model." If that language reads as intellectually serious to you, this is a distinctive place; if it reads as a stretch, that is the thing to resolve before enrolling.
The headline size is misleading and worth doing the arithmetic on. The 103 credits are QUARTER credits, and the catalog is explicit about the split: 92 credits (920 hours) of coursework plus 11 credits of supervised fieldwork. At the standard two-thirds conversion that is roughly 61 semester units of coursework and about 69 semester units all-in — an ordinary-sized California MFT degree, not an outsized one. Courses are 4 quarter credits each and run seven weeks; four quarters a year adds up to about 28 weeks of active instruction, "just about half the year that courses are actively running." The 23 courses the catalog names as covering the BBS MFT and LPCC content areas multiply out to exactly the 92 stated coursework credits. Coursework is primarily asynchronous online, with synchronous meetings encouraged but not required; students outside California but inside the US must come to a residential Transformative Learning Lab in California each academic year.
The consumer numbers deserve equal weight. Meridian's own 2024 filing with the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education reports 21 students beginning the M.A. in Counseling Psychology, 8 degrees awarded, 6 on-time graduates and an on-time completion rate of 28.57 percent; all 6 graduates available for employment were placed, but reported salaries clustered low (two under $30,000). Total charges for the program were reported as $62,192; the 2026–27 catalog rate is $676 per quarter credit, which puts 103 credits at about $69,600. Institution-wide, 365 students were enrolled, 279 of them doctoral — the master's program is a minority of a school whose center of gravity is its PsyD/PhD. Also note that a heavily promotional third-party site, meridianuniversityreviews.org, aggregates 75+ overwhelmingly positive testimonials and links out to Meridian's own website while disclosing no operator; treat it as marketing, not as independent review.
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.
Introduction to Transformative Learning
"This course introduces students to Imaginal Process, a distinct approach to transformative learning practiced at Meridian. In this approach, human capacities are cultivated through diversifying, deepening, embodying, and personalizing experience... Listening deeply to each other's stories is at the heart of this process."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the school's own method, taught as a required first course rather than described in a brochure. Nowhere else in California is 'Imaginal Process' a named pedagogy you enroll in; if you do not want it, essentially every later course is shaped by it too.
Ecstatic States of Culture
"This course utilizes myth, current psychological models, and our own experience to develop an integrated view of addiction that considers biology, psychology, cultural considerations, and human yearning. Issues regarding the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol will be explored within the contexts of culture and the human need for ecstatic experience."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingEvery California MFT program has to teach substance use and co-occurring disorders. Almost none teaches it as a course about ecstasy and human yearning. This single course tells you more about Meridian's temperament than any mission statement — it is the clearest test of whether the depth frame reads to you as illuminating or as evasive of a very concrete clinical competency.
Psychopathology
"Each of us suffers in a unique way. Yet it is interesting and useful to recognize distinct varieties of human suffering without succumbing to the diagnostic illusions of the medical model... A genuinely psychological approach draws our attention to culture, myth, story, and metaphor in the meaning we make about the symptoms we observe. The limits, ambiguities, and cruelties of professionalized responses to human suffering will be among our considerations."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThe DSM course at most programs is pure compliance. Here it is explicitly framed as a critique of the medical model, which matters practically: you will still need fluency in DSM-5 diagnosis for insurance panels and agency work, and you should ask how much drilling of that fluency this course actually contains.
Career Development
"Joseph Campbell's famous phrase, 'Follow your bliss,' is a directive that for most people is easier said than done." The course covers vocation, calling and "the potential relationship between forms of psychopathology and Western culture's lack of support for the notion of personal destiny," and is also where students "become thoroughly familiar with Meridian's fieldwork process" and formulate a fieldwork plan.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the course where the mythopoetic register and the practical machinery collide — it is both the Campbell course and the course where you plan the traineeship that will determine whether you finish on time. The catalog also lists it under the BBS 'California Laws and Professional Ethics' content area, which is worth asking about directly.
Healing and Transforming Trauma
"This course explores current issues in the field of psychological trauma through personal, historical, cultural, and archetypal perspectives. Its intent is threefold: To develop the student's ability to engage their own personal traumatic material (generally experienced through fragmented images that are the common aftermath of overwhelming experience); to integrate imaginal approaches to trauma with principles inherent in the recovery model; and to identify key somatic, cognitive, affective, behavioral, and neurological effects associated with trauma."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingNote the first of the three stated aims: the required trauma course asks you to work your own traumatic material, not only to learn protocols. Combined with the 40 required hours of personal psychotherapy, this is a program that treats the student's own psyche as coursework.
Psychology of Power, Privilege, and Culture
"In this course, we will explore the internalization of cultural oppression as well as oppressive voices towards 'the other' that live in our own hearts. The course will review forms of systematic oppression such as racism, sexism, classism, able-bodyism, adultism, ageism, and homophobia..."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the single course that carries the entire BBS cultural-competency requirement, and it is framed inwardly — internalised oppression and one's own oppressive voices — rather than as a survey of working with diverse populations. Useful to know if you want the latter.
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.
Meridian does not publish a term-by-term plan of study for the M.A. in Counseling Psychology. The 2026–27 catalog instead names the specific courses that satisfy each California BBS content area for the MFT and the LPCC; those 23 named courses at 4 quarter credits each come to exactly the 92 coursework credits the catalog states, with PSY 597 Supervised Fieldwork carrying the remaining 11 credits. The list below is that catalog mapping, not an official sequence. Courses run seven weeks; four quarters a year, about 28 weeks of active instruction; primarily asynchronous online with an optional hybrid track at the Los Angeles (Santa Monica) campus. course sequence ↗
103 quarter credits (92 coursework = 920 hours, + 11 fieldwork). Roughly 69 semester-unit equivalent.units in total
- ANC 101 Introduction to Transformative Learning (4)
- ANC 105 Emotional Development (4)
- ANC 110 Relational Development (4)
- ANC 130 Transformative Learning Praxis (4)
- MER 590 Research Methods (4)
- PSY 501 Psychopathology (4)
- PSY 505 Human Development (4) — also carries Aging and Long-Term Care
- PSY 510 Group Process (4) — also carries Human Communication
- PSY 515 Healing and Transforming Trauma (4)
- PSY 518 Psychology of Power, Privilege, and Culture (4) — cultural competency
- PSY 520 Culture and the Law (4) — law/ethics and child abuse reporting
- PSY 525 Career Development (4)
- PSY 530 Ecstatic States of Culture (4) — substance use and co-occurring disorders
- PSY 555 Psychotherapy Integration: Individual and Relational (4)
- PSY 556 Psychotherapy Integration with Couples (4) — carries spousal/partner abuse
- PSY 757 Psychotherapy Integration with Families (4)
- PSY 770 Principles of Psychopharmacology (4)
- PSY 771 Resilience, Recovery, & Systems of Care (4) — case management/systems of care
- PSY 772 Human Sexuality in Relational and Cultural Contexts (4)
- PSY 776 Psychological Assessment: Principles and Practices (4) — psychological testing
- PSY 751 Clinical Practicum: Therapeutic Contexts (4)
- PSY 752 Clinical Practicum: Therapy and Culture (4)
- PSY 753 Clinical Practicum: Classical Approaches (4)
- PSY 597 Supervised Fieldwork (11 credits)
- PSY 754 Clinical Practicum Extension (4) — required of MFT-bound students to overlap coursework with fieldwork hours per BBS
- Somatic Psychology (PSY 713–729): Foundations of Somatic Psychotherapy, Somatic Approaches to Trauma, The Knowing Body (Gendlin's Focusing), Psychology of Touch, Somatic Assessment
- Depth/Archetypal (PSY 733–742): Myth, Ritual, and Story; Psychology of Metaphor; Psychology of Evil; The Transformative Power of Ritual; Archetypal Psychology; PSY 712 Psychology of Dreams
- Expressive and Movement Arts (PSY 705–711): Expressive Arts in Therapy, Art Psychotherapy, Cultivating the Senses, Experiential Anatomy
- Integral / Transpersonal (PSY 780–783): Foundations of Integral Psychology (AQAL), Meta-Theory in Psychological Praxis; PSY 736 Psychology of Mystical Experience; PSY 701 Introduction to Yoga and Psychology
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 →
You find your own site
Securing a placement is your responsibility. A student who cannot find a site cannot graduate, and that risk is highest if you are rural, studying online, or need Spanish-language or specialty hours.
Students in degree programs that require field placement (internship) are responsible for utilizing the University's Fieldwork Handbook and support services to find their own employment/internship site. The University does not provide students with internal field placement/internship. the school’s own page →
There is no in-house training clinic. Meridian is an online school with two small centers (Petaluma and Santa Monica), and students arrange their own traineeship sites in their own region — the independent comparison site MFT California summarizes it as students who "conduct their fieldwork requirement in their local region and set up their own fieldwork, with support from Meridian," and the catalog's own language is the softer "Every effort is made to support students in selecting and completing required fieldwork" via ongoing contact with fieldwork staff and clinical faculty plus a Fieldwork Handbook discussed in the first year. Planning your own placement is treated as coursework: PSY 525 Career Development is where you build the fieldwork plan and weigh "the pros and cons of having fieldwork fulfill California licensing board hours, time frames and procedures for applying to and completing internships, the use of one's job as an internship site, and options for arranging alternative field placements." The academic side of practicum is a three-course sequence, PSY 751–753, covering intake assessment, case formulation, treatment planning, note-taking and crisis management, with PSY 752 focused on multicultural themes and PSY 753 introducing the scope of practice for LMFT and LPCC; MFT-bound students additionally take PSY 754 Clinical Practicum Extension so that coursework overlaps fieldwork as the BBS requires. The catalog does not publish a relational/couples sub-minimum, a supervision-hours formula, or a list of affiliated sites, and it states the fieldwork must be "clinical in nature" — a real constraint, since Meridian's fieldwork credits at the doctoral level can otherwise be earned through non-clinical work. Forty hours of personal psychotherapy are separately required and may in some cases be completed before enrollment. 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
Requires 40 hours of personal psychotherapy for graduation; transformative/generative learning orientation
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.
$676 a unit 2026-27 — source
What a month costs to live on while you study →
Getting in
A Bachelor's degree is required for admission to Meridian's Graduate Programs. The GPA requirement for admittance: Minimum GPA for admission to all degree programs at Meridian is a 3.0. source →
How its graduates did on the Board’s exam
Too few candidates to publish a rate
The Board recorded 24 first-time candidates from this school across the whole window, and this page does not print a percentage below 40. On a handful of candidates a single result moves the figure by tens of points, and a small program would be described by noise. It usually means the program is small, new, or both.
Recorded by the Board as Meridian 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.
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.
- No published term-by-term plan of study for the M.A. in Counseling Psychology — the curriculum above is reconstructed from the catalog's BBS content-area mapping, which happens to total exactly the stated 92 coursework credits.
- No published cohort size, acceptance rate or application deadline; Meridian states class size varies by quarter.
- No list of affiliated traineeship sites, no relational/couples hour sub-minimum, and no supervision-hours formula published for the 340-hour traineeship.
- No BBS/LMFT clinical exam pass rate published; Meridian's own 2024 BPPE filing answers 'No' to whether the M.A. leads to a state-licensed occupation, so no exam data is reported there either.
- No credible independent student discussion found on Reddit or Student Doctor Network. Niche (19 reviews) and a heavily promotional, undisclosed-operator site (meridianuniversityreviews.org) are essentially the only review sources; Yelp blocks automated access.
- No freely-licensed photograph of either Meridian location found on Wikimedia Commons.
Sources for this page (8)
- Meridian University 2026–27 Academic Catalog (PDF)
- MA in Counseling Psychology program page
- Psychology Course Descriptions
- Accreditation page
- BPPE 2024 Annual Report — Meridian University
- WSCUC institution record — Meridian University
- MFT California (independent comparison site) — Meridian University
- Niche graduate student reviews