What this program actually is
OrientationMulticultural / social-justice-framed generalist, with a community-mental-health recovery-and-wellness model as the practice frame and a broad survey of systemic and relational models rather than allegiance to one school
MFT at USF is not a standalone degree — it is one of four concentrations inside a single M.A. in Counseling Psychology run by the School of Education. The catalog lists the department's graduate majors as the MFT concentration, a Professional Clinical Counseling concentration, a School Counseling concentration with the Pupil Personnel Services credential, and a combined PCC + School Counseling concentration. You apply to the MFT concentration specifically and take a fully prescribed 60-unit list of twenty three-unit CPSY courses; there are no elective slots in it. The program runs as a cohort in either an eight-semester three-year format or a seven-semester two-year format (two-year is San Francisco only, and is aimed at applicants who already have a psychology or mental-health background). Classes are late-afternoon and evening — 3:45–6:15 p.m. and 7:20–9:50 p.m. — plus an intensive six-week summer term that runs Monday to Friday evenings with all-day Saturdays. It is also the most geographically spread MFT program in the Bay Area, taught at San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, South Bay and East Bay sites, though as of this writing the program page carries an alert that it is "not currently accepting applications at our San Francisco location for the Fall 2026 cohort."
The social-justice framing is real and it is load-bearing, but it shows up as language threaded through ordinary courses rather than as a separate required sequence. The application's Statement of Intent explicitly asks you to articulate your "connection to our social justice mission." The catalog's program learning outcomes are written around exploring "power, privilege, and marginalization, as it relates to therapy practice, through multiple perspectives, worldviews, and epistemologies." Inside the required twenty, the theories course is evaluated "based on its culture-bound factors and applicability to diverse populations"; the trauma course names "trauma associated with racism, poverty, violence, immigration, refugee status, homelessness"; the sexuality and gender course says it will "critically analyze the role of power and privilege." But there is exactly one dedicated multicultural course (CPSY 677 Counseling Across Cultures) in the required list. A prospective student should read this as a curriculum written in a social-justice register, not as a curriculum with a social-justice specialization.
The genuinely unusual thing in USF's course inventory is a cluster of Latinx and immigrant mental-health courses that exist in almost no other California master's catalog: CPSY 671 Spanish for Mental Health, CPSY 672 (Spanish microcounseling skills and Latinx evidence-based practice), CPSY 673 Latinx Psychology, CPSY 674 Immigration and Asylum, and CPSY 675, a one-unit eight-day immersion taught on the ground in Latin America. Be clear-eyed about the catch: these are restricted to "Certificate and Graduate" level in Counseling Psychology and sit outside the MFT concentration's fully prescribed 60 units, so an MFT student would be adding units beyond the degree to take them. On the Catholic/Jesuit question, the answer is plain: the required twenty courses contain no theology, spirituality or religion course at all. The Jesuit identity here surfaces as the social-justice language and the community-mental-health orientation, not as content.
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.
Community Mental Health
"This course helps students understand the model of community mental health recover and the skills needed for mental health practice. Students will participate in hands-on experiences through a community mental health immersion experience, in addition to learning about strength and evidence based therapeutic interventions aimed at mental health consumers of community mental health care."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThe recovery model is the program's practice frame, and this is the course that carries it — including a required community immersion in which students interact directly with mental-health consumers before they ever have a caseload. Most CA programs teach community mental health as a policy lecture; this one sends you into it.
Spanish for Mental Health
"Taught by a bilingual mental health clinician with knowledge of the mental health lexicon required to provide adequate clinical services to Spanish-dominant clients, this course utilizes readings, exercises, and interactive activities to improve the conversational, writing, listening, and reading Spanish language skills of students in professional contexts." Students review clinical records written in Spanish.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingA clinical-Spanish course taught by a clinician, not a language department, in which you read real Spanish-language clinical records. Only a handful of California programs offer this at all. Note that it is not part of the MFT concentration's required 60 units.
Immigration and Asylum
The course covers "the legal and psychological factors that impact immigrant clients," emphasises immigrant resilience, and addresses stressors "including forced separation, humiliating removal proceedings, deportation, and lengthy bars from admission into the U.S." By the end students "will be familiar with the legal marriage petition and asylum processes."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingA full course teaching therapists the mechanics of asylum and marriage-petition law is genuinely rare — this is the kind of content usually left to a two-hour CE workshop. It signals that USF expects graduates to work with mixed-status families as a matter of course.
International Immersion in Latin America
"The culture and language immersion course taught in Latin America, is an intensive eight-day program that focuses on helping students explore their own sociocultural identities within the context of Latinx culture." Students receive Spanish-language tutoring, learn from local mental health professionals, and study indigenous healing practices.catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingAn eight-day clinical immersion abroad, for one unit, inside a counseling master's is unusual anywhere in California. It is elective and outside the MFT required list, but it tells you where the department's energy is.
Relationship Therapy
Reviews "the formation and dynamics of interpersonal relationships in the individual, family, couples, and other relationships," and works through "Bowen, strategic, structural, experiential, cognitive-behavioral, psychoanalytic, solution-focused, narrative, emotion-focused, Gottman method, and integrative approaches" — each "examined for their intervention effectiveness with diverse communities and relationships."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingThis is where USF's answer to 'what is your model?' lives: a single survey course naming eleven schools of couple and family work, framed around 'relational constellations' rather than the married dyad. It is breadth by design, not depth in one tradition.
Sexuality & Gender Issues
Examines "the social psychological theories and research on how gender and sexuality shapes self-conceptions and social interactions," builds assessment and intervention skill, and raises "awareness of one's personal perceptions, attitudes in regard to sexuality and gender." Throughout, the course "critically analyze[s] the role of power and privilege in human sexuality and gender."catalog ↗
Why it is worth noticingCalifornia requires human-sexuality content for licensure and most programs discharge it in a one- or two-unit workshop. USF gives it a full three-unit required course built around clinical skill and self-examination, which is a meaningful difference in how seriously the topic is treated.
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.
Cohort model with fall entry, fully lockstep — the 60 units are twenty prescribed three-unit CPSY courses with no elective slots. The sequence below is the three-year (eight-semester) plan as published in the MFT Program Handbook (Fall 2020); the same twenty courses are still the stated major requirements in the USF catalog. A two-year, seven-semester version compresses the same courses using winter intersessions and is offered at the San Francisco campus only. course sequence ↗
60units in total
- CPSY 631 Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy (3)
- CPSY 634 Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues (3)
- CPSY 677 Counseling Across Cultures (3)
- CPSY 632 Child and Adolescent Development (3)
- CPSY 639 Individual and Family Psychopathology (3)
- CPSY 642 Counseling Methods (3)
- CPSY 630 Individual and Systems Assessment (3)
- CPSY 640 Relationship Therapy (3)
- CPSY 650 Trauma and Crisis Counseling (3)
- CPSY 647 Group Work in Clinical Settings (3)
- CPSY 687 Family Systems Therapy (3)
- CPSY 690 Research Methods (3)
- CPSY 646 Community Mental Health: Concepts of Recovery, Wellness, Systems of Care and Advocacy (3)
- CPSY 649 Sexuality and Gender Issues in Therapy (3)
- CPSY 651 Adult Development and Geropsychology (3)
- CPSY 654 Career Counseling (3)
- CPSY 665 Substance Abuse and Addictions Counseling (3)
- CPSY 683 Clinical Psychopharmacology (3)
- CPSY 637 Traineeship I (3)
- CPSY 638 Traineeship II (3)
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 →
The school does not say
Nothing on this school’s published pages states who secures your placement. That is not the same as a bad answer - but it is the first question to ask admissions, and the specificity of the reply tells you a great deal. Thirty of the seventy-eight are in this position.
During their final year in the program, students enter a traineeship with Bay Area community-based and school-based partners. the school’s own page →
The school runs its own training clinic. Center for Community Counseling and Wellness (CCCW) Owning a clinic and holding a seat in it are different things, so this sits beside the model above rather than replacing it.
USF calls its placement a Traineeship and it is the last thing in the program, not something running alongside coursework. CPSY 637 Traineeship I is "a Level 1 supervised experience in marriage and family therapy in an institutional setting under professional supervision," focused on case conceptualization, assessment, treatment planning and client-centered advocacy; CPSY 638 continues it. A third, one-unit CPSY 691 Traineeship III exists in the catalog with CPSY 638 as a prerequisite. Per the program handbook, "Each student will carry a client caseload, provide therapy, develop treatment plans, and receive weekly clinical supervision at their sites," and an on-campus traineeship class runs in parallel. Sites are "Bay Area community-based and school-based partners" who come to the program to present their services and training so students can apply — so the program curates the partner pool but students compete for and secure their own placement. You cannot start Traineeship carrying an incomplete or any grade below B-. Students wanting LPCC eligibility must complete additional face-to-face clinical hours before graduation beyond what the LMFT requires. 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
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.
$81,000 total 2026-27 — source
What a month costs to live on while you study →
Getting in
No, we do not require any standardized tests for the MFT MA program. source →
How its graduates did on the Board’s exam
Counting every attempt rather than only first attempts, the figure is 71% across 651 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, 84% of this school’s 656 first-time candidates passed, against 80% statewide.
Recorded by the Board as University of San Francisco, San Francisco. 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.
- Cohort size is not published anywhere USF puts online, and the FAQ does not give it.
- Required traineeship hours are not published. The FAQ says only that LPCC-track students need "additional hours of face-to-face clinical work" beyond the LMFT minimum; the specific numbers live in a separate traineeship manual given to enrolled students.
- The live USF catalog (catalog.usfca.edu) sits behind an AWS WAF challenge that blocks automated retrieval of program pages. The 60-unit course list here was read from the archived 2023–24 catalog program page and every course description from the live 2025–26 catalog (catoid=41) course pages, which did resolve. The current 2026–27 program page could not be opened, so a small change to the required list since 2023–24 cannot be ruled out.
- The term-by-term sequence is from the Fall 2020 MFT Program Handbook — the most recent sequence USF has published openly. Course numbers match the current catalog, but term placement may have shifted.
- No in-house training clinic was found; USF appears to place all trainees at external partner agencies.
- USF does not publish an admit rate, a yield, or graduate licensure exam pass rates for the MFT concentration.
Sources for this page (10)
- USF catalog 2023–24 — MFT concentration program requirements (via Internet Archive)
- USF catalog 2025–26 — Counseling Psychology (CPSY) course descriptions
- USF catalog — Counseling Psychology department, list of concentrations (via Internet Archive)
- MFT program overview — formats, schedule, traineeship
- MFT program FAQs — deadlines, tests, traineeship timing, transfers
- MFT how to apply — application requirements and Statement of Intent
- MFT tuition & aid — $1,350/unit for 2026–27, $81,000 total estimate
- MFT Program Handbook, Fall 2020 (course sequence, cohort model, traineeship)
- Niche — USF School of Education graduate reviews
- The GradCafe — "ACCEPTED. But now what? MSW vs MFT" (USF and Santa Clara)