San Francisco State University

What this program actually is

OrientationSystemic–familial–relational and developmentally-informed, inside a CACREP counselor-education frame with a heavy social-justice / cultural-foundations emphasis

SFSU does not have an MFT department. It has a Department of Counseling that runs three master's degrees and five specializations at once — Career, College, Clinical Mental Health, School, and Marriage, Family & Child Counseling — and MFCC is a concentration inside the M.S. in Counseling. Everyone in the building takes the same core (COUN 700, 702, 703, 705/706, 715, 720, 736, 738, 794, 811, 833, 857, 890, 891, 892) and the MFCC concentration is what gets bolted on top: a two-semester couple-and-family sequence (COUN 858 and 860), a child-treatment seminar (861), a 2-unit sexuality course (859) and a 1-unit consultation course (827). That is exactly 60 units with no electives — every one of the 21 required courses is prescribed. The department states the training emphasis plainly: "a culturally-informed and inclusive approach, and a developmentally-informed systemic-familial-relational orientation to counseling."

The department is CACREP-accredited and it shows in the fieldwork structure more than the coursework. Fieldwork starts in the very first semester — COUN 705 and COUN 706 must be taken concurrently, same section, same instructor, with a signed site contract before you enroll — and runs four consecutive semesters across two different year-long placements, 700 hours total with a 280-hour direct-contact floor. There is no in-house training clinic; the department instead maintains a vetted "Master List" of sites, and its 2023–24 CACREP report claims over 200 training partners and roughly 45,000 hours of mostly unpaid counseling delivered to Bay Area communities each year. Money partly offsets that: 72 of 148 enrolled students received $10,000 federally funded training stipends in 2024, and the department awarded $41,000 more in scholarships.

It is also the hardest of the three to get into, by a wide margin, and the department publishes the numbers. In the 2023–24 cycle it received 573 applications, admitted 55 and enrolled 49 across all three degrees — a roughly 10% admit rate — of whom 20 entered MFCC. Total department enrollment was 148, with 54 in MFCC. There is no GRE, but there is a 2,000-hour prior human-services work-experience requirement, a 3.0 GPA in the last 60 units, a 1,300-word personal statement, a post-admission writing-proficiency screen, and a single December 15 deadline for fall entry only. Students take an average of 2.9 years to finish (range 2–7). Anyone eyeing the LPCC should read the fine print: MFCC cannot be taken as an emphasis, so the LPCC route is MFCC plus a Clinical Mental Health Counseling emphasis, which is four additional courses (12 units) and a whole extra year of field placement on top of the 60.

The program’s own page →

See it and hear it

Program overview

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.

Fall admission only, in-person only, no online or hybrid option; full-time and part-time are both possible but the department warns that work schedules must flex around daytime, late-afternoon and evening classes. The department publishes both a 2-year and a 3-year roadmap; the 2-year grid is reproduced below (4 terms × 15 units = 60). The 3-year plan spreads the same 60 units as 9/12 + 12/9 + 9/9, moving COUN 705/706 to the second year. Course titles below are the official 2026–27 bulletin titles; the department's own advising handbook grid contains several mislabeled rows (e.g. it labels COUN 857 "Seminar in Research" and COUN 720 "Special expertise course"). Sequence is from the 2024–25 Student Advising Handbook; unit counts and the required-course list are from the 2026–27 Bulletin. 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 →

There is no in-house SFSU counseling clinic — all training happens at outside agencies, and the department says it works with over 200 community training partners across the Bay Area. Placement is the student's responsibility but is heavily gated: you may only apply to sites on the department's pre-approved "Master List" (kept on Teams), and the final decision is "a matter of consultation between the student, their faculty advisor, and the specialization faculty coordinator," with an internship coordinator and a faculty liaison layered on top. You do two separate year-long placements, each running fall-through-spring: COUN 705/706 then 736 in year one, then 890 then 891 at a different site in year two. Site commitment is 12–16 hours a week on at least two days in year one and 16–20 hours a week in year two, with a required caseload of 3–5 clients weekly in year one and 5–10 in year two. Supervision is triple-layered: at least one hour a week of individual supervision from a licensed on-site supervisor (for MFCC students the site supervisor must be a licensed therapist), roughly 1.5 hours a week of group supervision delivered through the weekly three-hour class meeting, plus five hours of individual supervision inside COUN 705. Every approved site has agreed to let trainees audio-record two to three client sessions per semester in COUN 736, 890 and 891 for review with both the site supervisor and the course instructor — you cannot pass those courses without the recordings. Fall below 80% of a semester's required hours and you get an Incomplete; two grades below B in 736/890/891 means declassification from 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

The Department of Counseling DOES NOT require GRE or undergraduate prerequisite courses source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 75% across 214 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, 90% of this school’s 158 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as San Francisco State 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.

• No MFCC-specific admit rate. The 573-applicant / 55-admit / 49-enroll figures are department-wide across three degrees; the department does not break out applications by specialization, only enrollments (20 of the 49 new students entered MFCC).
• No published relational (couple/family) sub-minimum inside the 700-hour degree fieldwork requirement. The handbook only states the 280-hour direct-contact floor and separately explains the BBS's post-degree 500-hour couples-and-families rule.
• The 2024–25 Student Advising Handbook's MFCC course-requirements table lists COUN 741 (Crisis Counseling) as required, which would make the degree 63 units. The 2026–27 Bulletin does not list COUN 741 and totals exactly 60, and neither of the handbook's own MFCC roadmaps includes 741. We have used the Bulletin. This matters for the LPCC calculation: if 741 is not part of the MFCC 60, the CMHC emphasis costs 12 extra units rather than 9.
• No published MFCC-specific licensure-exam pass rate. The annual report gives GPA, supervisor-evaluation pass rates and disposition data, but not BBS exam outcomes.
• Reddit could not be searched (the site blocked automated retrieval), and Student Doctor Network's only substantive SFSU thread is from 2009. No recent independent student reviews were located.
• Whether a 2025–26 practicum handbook exists; the most recent one the department has posted is 2024–25.