University of Massachusetts Global (formerly Brandman)

What this program actually is

OrientationSystemic/relational, taught as an explicit arc from cybernetic to postmodern — Structural, Strategic and Experiential in one required course; Narrative, Solution-Focused, Collaborative Language Systems and Emotionally Focused Family Therapy in its sequel

The name has changed three times and the entity has changed hands twice, so it is worth getting the lineage straight. It began in 1958 as Chapman College teaching on-base classes at MCAS El Toro; became Chapman University College in 2001; was separately incorporated in 2008; and was renamed Brandman University in 2009 after a gift from the Joyce and Saul Brandman Foundation. In September 2021 Brandman was transferred to the University of Massachusetts under a change-of-control agreement and became UMass Global. The financial terms are public: UMass committed roughly $130 million, Chapman receives $96 million over ten years with payments beginning in fiscal 2028, and UMass Global bought the Irvine campus for $37 million. What did not change is where it actually is or who accredits it. UMass Global is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, and it is "institutionally accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC)" — the same California regional accreditor Brandman held. It is a Massachusetts-branded, California-accredited, entirely online institution.

That history is not incidental to the decision. Enrollment fell from about 22,000 at acquisition to roughly 19,000; Chancellor David Andrews told the Boston Globe "we took a big hit" and that "the fall-off in enrollment was a lot sharper... than we thought. I mean, it was over 20 percent that we lost within the first 18 months." By June 2024 UMass Global carried over $81 million in debt for which the UMass system bears ultimate liability, and the system has extended $8.6 million of credit on its behalf to guarantee student financial aid. None of that means the school is closing. It does mean that if you are choosing this program partly because "UMass" sounds like a state flagship, you should know the relationship is an affiliation with overlapping boards, not membership in the UMass campus system, and that the affiliation is currently a cost center rather than a windfall.

On the geography question: this is not a California-only program, whatever a directory listing may say. UMass Global's own state-authorization table lists the MA in Marriage and Family Therapy as offered in 42 states, including California, and "Program not offered" in seven — Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The combined MFT/PCC emphasis is much narrower, offered in about 29 states (California among them) and not offered in Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota or Wisconsin. The catalog is blunt about the consequence: "If the student relocates to a state in which the program is not authorized, the student will be unable to complete the program." The three courses that turn the 60-credit MFT degree into the 69-credit dual degree — the ones that give California graduates APCC eligibility alongside AMFT — are named in the catalog and carry a different prefix: PSYU 521 Advanced Individual Therapy II, PSYU 539 Crisis and Trauma Counseling, and PSYU 545 Transition to Work and Career, three credits each.

The program is explicitly not COAMFTE-accredited — its own Graduate Achievement Data page says so — but unlike most non-accredited programs it publishes the data anyway, and the data is mixed in an informative way. Full-time cohorts have run 81, 77, 78 and 86 students (2021–22 through 2024–25). Job placement was reported at 100% for both completed cohorts (n=53 and n=36), and licensure at any MFT level at 95% and 85.71%. But graduation within the advertised 2.5 years was 65.00% for 2021–22 and 56.76% for 2022–23 — that is, more than four in ten recent full-time students did not finish on time, and the likeliest reason is in the practicum section below. At $770 a credit the degree costs about $46,200 for the 60-credit MFT emphasis or $53,130 for the 69-credit dual, which is materially cheaper than either California brick-and-mortar option in this comparison set.

The program’s own page →

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.

Fully online, instructor-led, in eight-week sessions with six start points a year. No cohort in the ordinary sense — the program is 23 courses split into a 17-course didactic phase (51 credits) and a 6-course practicum phase (9 credits). Full-time is two courses per session, giving an advertised 2.5 years; the maximum is seven years. Eight named courses plus a passed oral "advancement" examination gate entry to practicum. Total is 60 credits for the MFT emphasis; the combined MFT/PCC emphasis adds three PSYU courses for 69. course sequence ↗

69units 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 →

Say this bluntly, because for an online program it is the whole decision: UMass Global does not place you. The Clinical Handbook's sentence is "Students are responsible for securing a practicum site while actively collaborating with their CFR" — the Clinical Faculty Representative reviews an approved-site list, discusses process, and vets agencies you bring, but you do the searching, the applying and the interviewing. The marketing line "our dedicated field support team helps you identify potential clinical sites in your community" describes that vetting function, not a placement service. Two details tell you how hard this actually is in practice. First, approval of a site that is not already on the list "may take 1–2 months or longer," and hours accrued at an unapproved site "may be considered unethical" and will not count toward graduation. Second — and this is the sentence to read twice — the professional conduct policy lists "Failure of the student to secure a practicum placement after interviewing at 7 sites" as a condition that automatically triggers a formal Step One professional conduct meeting, the same procedure used for a placement termination. A program that has written a disciplinary trigger for failing to get placed after seven interviews is a program that has seen students fail to get placed after seven interviews. That is very likely what is behind on-time graduation of 65.00% and then 56.76%: if you cannot find a site you cannot enroll in MFT 660, and if you run out of hours you are moved into the zero-credit MFT 696 continuation course and charged a fee until you finish or your seven-year clock expires. Two further constraints bind where you can look: "Students are mandated to provide clinical services within their state of residency and cannot provide clinical service across state lines or internationally," and if you move to a state where the program is not authorized you cannot finish at all. One clarification on the advertised "in-person" hours: the handbook defines direct client contact as occurring "in-person synchronously, either physically in the same location or mediated by technology," so supervised telehealth counts. source ↗

Will this degree travel

What the Board requires of any qualifying degree →

What it is, on paper

The Board’s listing is qualified: it reads “University of Massachusetts Global – California campus only”. UMass Global is a national institution and the Board’s approval does not extend past the California campus, so confirm which campus a given cohort is enrolled through before assuming the degree qualifies.

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

No Grad Level Exams Required This Master's degree program does not require applicants to take costly exams like the GRE. source →

admissions page ↗

How its graduates did on the Board’s exam

Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 55% across 1,185 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, 71% of this school’s 890 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.

Recorded by the Board as Brandman University · UMASS Global. 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 freely-licensed photograph exists. Wikimedia Commons holds only the UMass Global wordmark (public domain) and no image of the Aliso Viejo headquarters or the former Irvine campus; the institution is fully online, so there is no campus to photograph in any case.
• The program is not COAMFTE-accredited, so the achievement data it publishes is self-reported and not externally audited.
• College Scorecard publishes no program-level debt or earnings figures for the CIP that contains marriage and family therapy at UMass Global. CIP 51.15 (Mental and Social Health Services and Allied Professions), master's level, shows 181 and 210 awards in the two most recent years but all earnings and all debt values are suppressed; the only field-of-study earnings figures at the institution are for CIP 13.11 Student Counseling and Personnel Services master's ($68,207 at one year, $81,233 at four), which is school counseling, not MFT.
• No Reddit, Student Doctor Network or GradCafe thread specific to the UMass Global or Brandman MFT program could be found; the student reviews that exist are from other programs at the same institution.
• The 2023–24 and 2024–25 cohorts' graduation, placement and licensure figures are all still marked "in progress."
• How many of the roughly 80 annual full-time students are California residents is not published, so the California cohort size is unknown.
• The Kansas row does not appear in either column of the state-authorization table, so its status is unclear.