Touro University Worldwide

What this program actually is

OrientationSystemic/relational family systems, explicitly framed by the scientist-practitioner model; broad and conventional rather than committed to any one school, with unusual required breadth into aging, long-term care and interpersonal communication

Touro University Worldwide is the extreme end of the online MFT market, and it is honest about it in a way that repays close reading. It is a genuine non-profit — part of the Jewish-sponsored Touro University System, WSCUC-accredited, operating out of an office suite at 10601 Calle Lee in Los Alamitos rather than a campus. The MA in Marriage and Family Therapy is 100% online in eight-week terms with six start points a year (Fall 1, Fall 2, Spring 1, Spring 2, Summer 1, Summer 2), no residency of any kind, and it is cheap by California standards: $525 per semester credit, 72 credits, $37,800 in tuition for the clinical track. It is also enormous. The program's own Spring 2026 student-demographics disclosure counts 675 students on the MFT track plus 198 on the Counseling Licensure track — 873 people in a single master's program.

The thing a prospective student most needs to know is not on the marketing page in any form you would notice: the program has been under a COAMFTE sanction since the beginning of 2024. TUW words it as a boast — "Marriage and Family Therapy Track – The ONLY track Accredited by COAMFTE with show cause" — but "show cause" is COAMFTE's most serious continuing action short of revocation. The Commission voted on 7 December 2023 and notified the university on 5 January 2024, after reviewing three student complaints, one of them filed by thirteen students together on 28 August 2023. The Commission found "a pattern of non-compliance with COAMFTE's Standards and Key Elements," required a focused site visit at the program's own expense, and cited failures against nine separate criteria, including Key Element III-C — the one that governs clinical supervision. Its central finding is worth quoting because it goes to the heart of what you would be buying: the program designated external site supervisors as the "primary supervisors" providing the required MFT relational/systemic supervision, but "did not demonstrate how 'primary supervisors' have an MFT identity and MFT supervision training information/credentials," and "did not provide a process for verifying that the site supervisors meet the requirements to be a program clinical supervisor." As of TUW's own 2026 publications the show-cause language is still there.

Set against that, the outcome data is not uniformly bad and deserves to be read fairly. Licensure rates for graduates who finish are high — 88.55%, 98.64% and 93.22% for the three most recent completed full-time cohorts, comfortably above COAMFTE's 70% benchmark — and job placement has run 85% to 100%. Median federal graduate debt is $40,813 with a median monthly payment of $464 against median earnings one year out of $53,988: the most survivable debt-to-earnings ratio of the three heavily-online California programs by a wide margin. What has been collapsing is completion. Full-time graduation within the advertised 2.5 years has fallen every single cohort: 75.00%, then 62.04%, then 59.54%, then 53.85%. Part-time completion runs below 58%. The likeliest single explanation is in the practicum section below.

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.

72 credits for the COAMFTE-accredited clinical MFT track: 18 didactic courses (54 credits) plus 6 practicum courses (18 credits). Every course is three credits and eight weeks long, delivered fully asynchronously online, with six start terms per year and no cohort. The Counseling Licensure (LPCC) track adds four courses (MFT 650, 651, 653, 698) for 82 credits; a non-clinical MFT Studies track is 54 credits and is neither COAMFTE-accredited nor CA BBS approved. There is no fixed term-by-term grid — the 2026-2028 handbook publishes two recommended 'Course Order' progressions instead, and students may enter in any of the six terms. Advertised length is 2.5 years full-time, 5 years part-time; the maximum allowed is 5 years regardless of enrollment status. course sequence ↗

72units 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 →

State this bluntly, because it is the whole decision: Touro does not place you. The sentence "TUW is not responsible for finding the clinical placement site and/or agency for students. The student is responsible for finding the clinical placement site and arranging a formal interview" appears verbatim in at least three separate official documents, and the enrollment agreement every applicant must sign says "I understand that practicum placement is not guaranteed by the MFT program because field agencies determine who will be placed at their agency." The program offers help — a Practicum Coordinator, orientation meetings twice a term, a Memorandum of Agreement template — but the search, the applications and the interviews are yours, and the handbook advises starting six months to a year before you intend to enroll in MFT 640A. The consequence if you fail is spelled out and is severe: "TUW allows three (3) attempts to start the practicum and drop an MFT 640 series course. After the third attempt, the student will have a choice to continue the program without practicum by completing the non-licensure track" — that is, converting to the MFT Studies track, which is neither COAMFTE-accredited nor CA BBS approved and does not lead to a license. There is no in-house training clinic anywhere in the system. Supervision runs on two levels: an external "ancillary (site) supervisor" at the agency who provides the COAMFTE-required relational/systemic supervision and signs your hours, plus TUW faculty "Program Clinical Supervisors" running live Zoom practicum classes; hours do not begin accruing until the MOA is signed, the site is approved, and you are registered in MFT 640A. That two-tier supervision arrangement is precisely what COAMFTE found non-compliant in January 2024 — the Commission held that TUW had not shown its site supervisors met the MFT-identity and relational/systemic-supervision qualifications required to count as program clinical supervisors at all. source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

Program states the MFT track meets CA BBS requirements without additional coursework. 300 practicum client-contact hours, ≥100 relational.

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.

$37,800 total — source

What a month costs to live on while you study →

Getting in

Since Touro University Worldwide does not believe that entrance exams are accurate predictors of future student success, TUW does not require any GRE and/or GMAT for admission. 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, 77% of this school’s 465 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as TOURO 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 the accreditor makes it publish

In the school’s own words, this counts: “Licensure rate is the percentage of graduates from the cohort year that have achieved ANY level of MFT licensure.” — which is worth reading before the numbers, because it is rarely what the column heading suggests.

FT

PT

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.

The school’s own disclosure → · most recent 5 cohorts shown

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.

• Does the degree satisfy California BBS requirements? Yes, unambiguously — but only on two of three tracks. TUW states that "The COAMFTE approved Marriage and Family Therapy track... and the Counseling Licensure track at Touro University Worldwide are approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (BBS)." The third track, MFT Studies, is explicitly 'not CA BBS Approved' and does not lead to a license — and it is the track students are pushed toward if they cannot secure a practicum site within three attempts.
• Other states: TUW's signed student agreement lists 42 jurisdictions where the standard degree plan is determined to meet MFT licensure education requirements (AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, FL, GA, HI, ID, IL, IA, KS, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NH, NY, NC, ND, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY); nine where one or more additional courses beyond the standard plan are needed (CO, CT, DE, IN, NJ, NM, SC, TX, Washington DC); and it lists 'N/A' — none — where the degree does not meet requirements. TUW's separate Portability of Degree notice warns more cautiously that "Some state regulatory boards do not accept degrees earned online as meeting the educational requirements for licensure." These two statements sit uneasily together and a prospective out-of-state student should verify directly with their own board.
• The current status of the December 2023 show-cause action could not be resolved. TUW's own 2026-dated publications still say 'accredited with show cause', and its next scheduled COAMFTE accreditation review was Spring 2026, but no Spring 2026 action letter for Touro appears in COAMFTE's published Notice of Actions. Whether the sanction has been lifted, continued, or is pending is unknown as of this research.
• COAMFTE's public directory of accredited programs could not be loaded to independently confirm the current status string.
• 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. The 'voices' above are documentary — but note that the COAMFTE letter is itself a record of thirteen-plus students formally complaining, which is stronger evidence than most forum threads.
• No freely-licensed photograph exists. Wikimedia Commons has no category for Touro University Worldwide; the one file surfacing under that name (File:GTFLETCHTUW.png) is categorized under 'Logos of universities' and is a logo uploaded as 'own work', not a photograph of any building.
• The exact duration of the weekly live Zoom supervision conference is stated inconsistently across sources and was not verified from a primary TUW document.