What this program actually is
Sonoma State's route to LMFT is not a marriage-and-family-therapy program at all in name — it is a 60-unit M.A. in Counseling with a Clinical Mental Health Counseling concentration, run out of a counselor-education department that also trains K-12 school counselors. The practical consequence is the answer to the question most applicants ask: getting LMFT eligibility out of this LPCC-shaped degree costs zero extra units and no extra semesters. The single 60-unit plan is the whole thing, and the department states it "meets the California Board of Behavioral Sciences educational requirements for the marriage and family therapy and professional clinical counselor licenses in California." The BBS education-resources table confirms it, listing Sonoma State for both LMFT and LPCC. The dual coverage is welded into ordinary courses rather than bolted on: the catalog description of COUN 540 says it "includes focus on 3 units of special topics toward the CA LPCC license," and COUN 545 carries one more such unit. You are not choosing a track at admission; you graduate eligible for both exams and decide afterward.
The other distinguishing thing is that Sonoma actually publishes its outcomes, because its accreditor makes it. The CMHC concentration is accredited by MPCAC — the Masters in Psychology and Counseling Accreditation Council, "for the period of September 2022 through September 2030" — not CACREP, which is the more common badge and a meaningfully different one. The department's public program-data page shows 223 applications for 2024-25, 34 accepted (15.2%), 29 matriculated, 59 enrolled in total, and 26 graduates; 2024 licensure exam pass rates were 100% on the LMFT clinical exam and 90% on LMFT law and ethics, against 60% on the LPCC clinical exam. Very few California programs put that on a public page. Structurally the program is heavy and lockstep — four courses a term, most of them 4 units, 16/13/15/16 units across four semesters — and the department's own FAQ concedes the second-year traineeship is a "17-22 hour a week commitment, in addition to other coursework."
It is also the only public counseling master's in the North Bay, and the first semester is shared ground with the school-counseling students: COUN 501, 510A, 545 and 570 are the common 19-unit core before the two specializations diverge.
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.
Applied Counseling Practicum and Advanced Techniques
"This course provides students with an opportunity to continue the development of multiculturally-competent counseling skills necessary for advanced field training during the COUN 515A/B Supervised Field Experience sequence." CMHC students do on-campus client work; School Counseling students train in K-12 settings. Crisis intervention and trauma-informed approaches are emphasized.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is the spring of year one, and it is where Sonoma puts clients in front of you a full year before the formal field placement. Most California programs make the first two semesters entirely didactic; here the second semester is already a supervised on-campus caseload, which is why liability insurance is due before spring starts.
Counseling Orientation, Law and Ethics, and Case Management Practices
Examines "legal and ethical responsibilities of the Clinical Mental Health Counselor (CMHC)" — confidentiality, mandatory reporting, domestic violence assessment — alongside case management technique and "cultural considerations as they impact counseling and case management practices." Fulfils MFT and LPCC educational requirements, including one unit toward the California LPCC license.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingWorth reading closely because it shows the mechanics of the dual-licensure design: rather than a separate LPCC bridge, the extra LPCC content is metered out inside required courses one unit at a time. It also runs in the very first semester, so the law-and-ethics exam material is front-loaded rather than saved for the end.
Counseling Diverse Couples and Families
"This course offers theoretical, principle, and methodological foundations for understanding diverse couple and family relationships by providing an overview of historical and contemporary models of conceptualization, assessment, and intervention. Attention is devoted to important legal, ethical, and clinical considerations unique to working with families and couples, including partner abuse assessment, intervention, and dynamics; child abuse reporting; and roles of families and systems in substance abuse and dependence."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis single fall course carries essentially all of the relational-therapy training in a 60-unit degree — one 4-unit course covering couples, families, partner abuse and child abuse reporting. If systemic and family work is what draws you to LMFT rather than LPCC, know that Sonoma treats it as one course in a counseling curriculum, not as the organizing frame of the program.
Clinical Mental Health Counseling / Supervised Field Experience I and II
The two-semester second-year field sequence. "Six hundred clock hours of supervised field experience" are required for the CMHC specialization. "All CMHC candidates are required to complete a clinical case presentation, and are also required to pass the CMHC Exit Exam. Both of these are required as part of the Counseling 515B Supervised Field Experience II course."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThe 600-hour figure and the exit exam are the two numbers to plan around. 600 clock hours over two semesters at a site — the FAQ puts it at 17 to 22 hours a week — is a substantial second year, and unlike many programs the degree is gated on passing a departmental exit exam, not merely on completing hours.
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.
Lockstep cohort, four courses a term across four semesters; the department also publishes a 2.5-year plan for students who need a lighter load. 19 units of shared counseling core (COUN 501, 510A, 511F, 513, 570) plus 41 units of CMHC-specific coursework. Course list below is the published 2-year sample plan. course sequence ↗
60units in total
- COUN 501 Theory and Practice of the Professional Counselor (4)
- COUN 510A Applied Counseling Techniques and Assessment (4)
- COUN 545 Counseling Orientation, Law and Ethics, and Case Management Practices (4)
- COUN 570 Multicultural Counseling (4)
- COUN 510B Applied Counseling Practicum & Advanced Techniques (4)
- COUN 503 Clinical Diagnosis & Treatment Planning (4)
- COUN 582 Psychopharmacology for Counselors (3)
- COUN 583 Substance Abuse & Dependence (2)
- COUN 515A Clinical Mental Health Counseling / Field Experience I (4)
- COUN 540 Counseling Diverse Couples & Families (4)
- COUN 502 Lifespan Development in Clinical Practice (4)
- COUN 511F Career Counseling: Foundations, Measurement and Assessment, and Issues Throughout the Lifespan (3)
- COUN 515B Clinical Mental Health Counseling / Field Experience II (4)
- COUN 580 Relationship and Sexuality Counseling (4)
- COUN 512 Theory and Practice of Group Counseling (4)
- COUN 513 Research, Evaluation and Assessment in Counseling (4)
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 apply, with the school’s help
There is an approved-site list and real support, and the seat is still yours to win. Most programs are here and most students manage it. Ask for last year’s numbers rather than the policy: how many students placed on the first round, and how many had to extend.
Both the Clinical Mental Health and School Counseling programs are affiliated with many counseling and school traineeship sites throughout Sonoma County and the greater bay area. [...] In the spring semester of the CMHC students' first year, they attend a mandatory traineeship fair hosted by the Counseling Department. the school’s own page →
Client contact starts earlier here than at most California programs. In the second semester of year one, COUN 510B has CMHC students doing on-campus client work while continuing skills training, and the department's FAQ describes that spring practicum as "approximately 15 hours per week in addition to other coursework." Liability insurance is a hard gate on that: "CMHC Students must secure liability insurance by the start of their second semester in the program," with the declarations page uploaded by the first day of spring. The real placement is the second year — COUN 515A and 515B together require "Six hundred clock hours of supervised field experience," which the FAQ frames as a "17-22 hour a week commitment, in addition to other coursework," at mental health clinics, counseling centers and college counseling centers. Graduation is gated on two things inside COUN 515B: "All CMHC candidates are required to complete a clinical case presentation, and are also required to pass the CMHC Exit Exam." The department does not publish, on any page we could reach, who is responsible for securing the year-two site, whether the on-campus COUN 510B client work happens in a named training clinic, or a minimum number of relational (couple/family) hours within the 600. 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
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 undergraduate GPA of a 3.0 is required for admission. source →
How its graduates did on the Board’s exam
Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 93% across 122 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 111 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.
Recorded by the Board as Sonoma 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.
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 the accreditor makes it publish
The school publishes the required table, and it currently carries no completed cohorts.
Graduation is measured against each school’s own advertised length, which across the twelve accredited programs runs from two years to four and a half — so a low figure often means students chose a longer track rather than that they did not finish. Licensure and placement are usually shares of the graduates who answered a survey, not of the cohort. Both are reasons these numbers describe one program over time and cannot be set against another school’s.
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.
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.
- Who secures the second-year field placement — program-placed, student-found, or a mix — is not stated on any Sonoma page we could reach. This is the single most consequential unknown for an applicant and worth asking the department directly.
- Whether the on-campus client work in COUN 510B happens in a named training clinic (as opposed to informally through the department or the campus counseling center) is not published.
- No relational / couple / family sub-minimum is published within the 600 field-experience hours. BBS counts relational hours separately toward the LMFT, so this matters.
- The application deadline and whether the GRE is required are not stated on the CMHC application-requirements page; the page covers GPA, prerequisite courses, experience and essay only.
- Course descriptions for COUN 580 (Relationship and Sexuality Counseling), COUN 512, COUN 502 and COUN 503 could not be retrieved — Sonoma's Acalog catalog returns empty responses for program and course-list pages from this environment, and only individual course pages surfaced by search could be fetched. Titles and unit values above come from the department's own published sample plan and are reliable.
- No credible first-person student discussion of this program was found. Reddit search was unavailable from this environment, so treat this as 'not looked for exhaustively' rather than 'nothing exists'.
- No freely-licensed campus photograph could be verified — Wikimedia Commons was unreachable from this environment. Do not substitute a university publicity image.
Sources for this page (11)
- Clinical Mental Health Counseling program page, Department of Counseling
- Degree Programs — Department of Counseling
- Sample CMHC Plan / 2-Year
- Program FAQ — Department of Counseling
- CMHC Program Data & Evaluation (applications, admits, licensure pass rates)
- CMHC application requirements
- COUN 510B course description, SSU catalog
- COUN 545 course description, SSU catalog
- COUN 540 course description, SSU catalog
- 2026-27 Student Charges/Fees, Seawolf Service Center
- BBS Education Resources — school/license table