Are COAMFTE Schools Better?

I often get asked if COAMFTE accreditation is “the best,” or if COAMFTE-accredited programs are the “highest quality.” The truth is, I do tell my clients to select a COAMFTE program under a couple different circumstances:

1. They plan on moving to at least one new state in the future, and they don’t know where, so they can’t look up the licensing requirements to determine if their future state is a COAMFTE superfan.

2. They’re having a tough time deciding between two programs and all other variables are equal, but one has COAMFTE accreditation and the other does not.

If you ask me my personal opinion, I’m not convinced that COAMFTE accreditation automatically equals a "better” or “higher quality” MFT education. The inimitable Dr. Ben Caldwell put it best: “In short, as a student COAMFTE accreditation can help you — but only because states have made policy decisions around it, not because it guarantees (or even indicates) a *better* education.” I did graduate from a COAMFTE-accredited program, but I suspect the quality of my education had more to do with the program director (Diane Gehart), the faculty she assembled, and the curriculum she promoted instead of slavish adherence to COAMFTE standards.

All that being said, programs that have pursued and achieved COAMFTE accreditation do have to do things that other MFT programs in California do not have to do. Depending on your perspective, you might think that results in a better education. But before we get into that, I think it would be helpful to explain a little bit about COAMFTE—what it is, why it’s important, and whether it should matter to you.

What is COAMFTE?

The Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE) is a small-but-mighty organization that accredits marriage and family therapy programs in the United States and Canada. Their mission “is to promote best practices for Marriage and Family Therapy educational programs through the establishment, review and revision of accreditation standards and policies, and the accreditation of graduate and post-graduate educational programs.” That means they create a standard they think all MFT programs should conform to, and they coordinate the process by which programs demonstrate they meet those standards and deserve the stamp of approval that is COAMFTE accreditation.

Why is COAMFTE important?

Some influential stakeholders think COAMFTE accreditation is super important. For example, the national professional organization that represents marriage and family therapists (and the parent organization of COAMFTE), the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), really thinks you should go to a COAMFTE-accredited program for philosophical/theoretical reasons that have to do with preserving the “purity” of the field of marriage and family therapy.

State licensing boards are another stakeholder with feelings about COAMFTE. So far, I have found one state (Mississippi) that feels SO strongly about COAMFTE accreditation that you must have graduated from a COAMFTE program in order to go through the MFT licensure process there (though it looks like if you have gotten fully licensed in another state, you’ll be able to get an MFT license in Mississippi if you want to, no matter where you went to school). A lot of other states say that MFT license applicants in their state must have COAMFTE or equivalent degrees. That means that it’s ok if your program didn’t actually go through the process to get the COAMFTE stamp—as long as they require the same things a COAMFTE program requires, you’re good. But some other states—like California—don’t think COAMFTE matters at all. But Dr. Caldwell pointed out to me that some states seem to interpret “equivalent” to mean that students must meet the COAMFTE requirement for clinical (and relational) hours, having an AAMFT-approved supervisor, or both. So there may be a state out there who is happy that your program provided you the curriculum-equivalent of a COAMFTE education, but might be super cranky that you didn’t have an AAMFT-approved supervisor.

BUT—remember how I said I tell my clients to choose a COAMFTE program if they think they might move out of state? It’s because no matter how I, or you, or California feel about COAMFTE, the feelings that really matter are those of the state licensing board in your future state. It’s kind of like when you try to decide what to take for a potluck dinner with friends. You could bring a meat and cheese board, but someone might be vegan. You could bring a pasta salad, but someone might have a gluten allergy. But if you show up with vodka and ice, no one is gonna be disappointed (because even your sober friends want ice for their drinks, and you know whoever was supposed to get ice totally forgot). No state is going to be disappointed that you graduated from a COAMFTE program. Graduating with a COAMFTE degree ensures you the greatest flexibility to be an MFT anywhere in the country.

Now, does this mean that every COAMFTE program is Grey Goose? Not automatically.

Are COAMFTE programs the best?

What makes COAMFTE programs different from other programs in California are the hoops they have to jump through—and the hoops they have to make their students jump through. These hoops are designed to support the standards and principles COAMFTE thinks are important (if you like reading about marriage and family therapy philosophy, check out pages 5-7 of this document).

If you agree with COAMFTE, and AAMFT, and the state of Mississippi that those standards and principles in action result in the best possible MFT education, then yeah, you might agree that COAMFTE programs are the best, full stop.

I don’t really care to debate this point, honestly.

What I do care about is the mistaken assumption that any COAMFTE program is “better” than all non-COAMFTE programs by virtue of the COAMFTE accreditation.

I think there can still be concerns about a program that has successfully jumped through all of COAMFTE’s hoops.

Let’s take a deeper dive into a specific example.

The 2015-2016 Cohorts of the COAMFTE Programs in California

One of the hoops COAMFTE programs have to jump through is that they have to publicly post student outcome data. That means you get access to some interesting statistics just by perusing the programs’ websites.

I decided to take a look at the outcome data for the cohorts of MFT students that began their COAMFTE-accredited programs in the 2015-2016 academic year. I picked that year because anyone who started then had enough time to finish their degree without the impact of COVID. It strikes me as a sample that’s more representative of cohorts that will be starting in the post-COVID world.

Schools have to report how many students entered the program with that cohort and the percentage of those students that graduated within the advertised amount of time the program is supposed to take.

Essentially, the programs say you can graduate from their program in a given amount of time. How many students actually do?

Here’s what I found.

What you’re looking at is a visual representation of what I found. As you can see, the schools on the left were pretty successful at graduating their cohorts in the time they advertised. The schools on the right…not so much. Let’s look even closer at the data.

This table contains all the data in the bar graph above. You can see, for example, that the Sacramento branch of Alliant International University enrolled 11 students in their 2015-2016 cohort. Alliant advertised they could graduate the program in 2 years, and wouldn’t you know it, all 11 of them did!

Now, Chapman University enrolled 24 students that same year, and graduated 79% of them in the 3 years they advertised. Chapman students have up to 7 years to complete the program, though, and 92% of that 2015-2016 cohort were able to graduate in that time frame. But let’s not forget…that means that 2 students in that cohort possibly never graduated. Which happens! I mean, life gets in the way, or maybe they realized the field wasn’t for them, who knows. But two didn’t make it to the finish line, at least before they started losing credits.

So let’s take a look at Hope International University. HIU enrolled 46 students in their 2015-2016 cohort. That’s one of the larger COAMFTE cohorts in the state—only CSUN (53) and Northcentral (360) admitted more students. At HIU, only 45.65% were able to graduate in the advertised 2 years. BUT! Given the maximum of 6 years, the entire cohort was able to do it!

However, one of the most interesting examples to me is Northcentral. This is an online-only university that advertised going through the program full-time would take 4.5 years. Unfortunately, only 41% were able to do that in that timeframe. And even more unfortunately, unlike HIU (also an online program) where the rest of the cohort was just lagging behind a couple years, it looks like only about 29 more people were able to graduate after 6 years in the program.

This is what I find concerning: MOST of the admitted cohort at Northcentral didn’t finish the program in the maximum allowed amount of time.

Why??

Having gone through a COAMFTE program myself, I have some ideas. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back to those hoops that COAMFTE students have to jump through because…COAMFTE.

A Closer Look at Northcentral, My Experience at CSUN, and COAMFTE Requirements

Look, grad school is hard in general, COAMFTE or not. The only colleagues I know that weren’t stressed out in grad school were the very lucky few who 1) didn’t need to worry about money, 2) didn’t work outside of doing clinical hours for grad school, and 3) didn’t have to take care of families.

In my experience, it’s not really the coursework that’s tough—MFT school isn’t med school or law school. But trying to balance my clients’ schedules with my class schedule AND my part-time work schedule AND my regular-life schedule (ok, my dog’s schedule) was crazy-making. And COAMFTE made it worse.

Let’s look at the things that I found difficult (or was lucky to not find difficult) about MFT grad programs.

Finding a Site

The field site experience varies widely from program to program. Some schools have a clinic on-site that all students do their hours at, while others have dedicated staff members (not faculty) who work with each student individually to find “the right” field placement for them—that’s the high end of supportive. CSUN’s support was sort of in the middle of the spectrum—there was a field site fair (a bunch of program reps came to our school to pitch to us why we should do our hours at their site); there was a list of maybe 30 local sites that had completed agreements with CSUN and where previous students had completed hours; and we had a professor who did double-duty as the field-site coordinator to whom we could go to if we needed guidance. There wasn’t a lot of hand-holding, but at least there was someone who could give us the skinny on whether it was worth pursuing that site, should we accept that offer, will I really be able to get relational hours at that site??, etc. I didn’t need to do any of my own legwork to find my placement—I just picked one I liked, applied, interviewed, and got accepted. Some of my classmates weren’t so lucky. They applied at a couple places and didn’t get accepted, so they talked with our coordinator, who helped them pick some other sites to target. One of my friends ended up with an awful experience at her field site and had to switch after a few months. But no one got seriously derailed from earning hours.

So what’s it like at Northcentral? They have an entire page on their website dedicated to the field site process, and here’s some of what they say:

NCU MFT faculty work with students to secure appropriate practicum/internship sites in their local areas. We recognize that not all applicants live in areas that have the behavioral health infrastructure necessary to complete the clinical training required for the NCU MFT programs; thus even before students enroll in the program we begin to work with them during the application process to help determine whether there are appropriate sites and supervisors in their local area. In the vast majority of cases students are able to locate appropriate placement sites and supervisors in their local area. On average our Master’s degree students locate a placement site in 15 weeks from the time they begin their search. In rare cases students may elect to relocate during the practicum/internship portion of their program in order to complete this requirement. If during the application process it becomes clear there are very limited options to secure a supervisor and site in students’ local areas (and relocation is not an option) we strongly recommend applicants put forth extra effort to make connections with providers at local sites before enrolling in the program. We recognize that for some students locating and securing a placement site and supervisor can be a challenging, and at times stressful process.

So essentially, they start checking to make sure you’ve got a handle on fieldwork as soon as you apply, and they warn you that it’s going to take some time to find a placement, and because some areas don’t have a lot of sites (“the behavioral health infrastructure”), you might even have to move to complete your hours. I think that’s wonderful that they are being so upfront with students. I wonder if maybe this process wasn’t in place in 2015-2016? So maybe a lot of people applied and got accepted, assuming they’d be able to find a site no problem…and then….couldn’t. Hopefully it’s gotten better since then, if that’s what was going on. However… Here is some more guidance provided in the Northcentral MAMFT Clinical Handbook:

• For some students, finding an appropriate training site and Local Clinical Supervisor is the most difficult part of the CPP, so it is recommended that students start looking early in their program… Based on the data, the average time to secure a practicum site and supervisor was 15 weeks (4 months). Some students took longer, up to a year. Allow plenty of time to find a site and supervisor. Use the resources in MFT Clinical Support (in NCUOne). Above all, network, network, network and start this process of looking and networking as soon as possible. Finding a site and Local Clinical Supervisor takes work and persistence on the student’s part. This is the same kind of persistence and networking that students will need to build a successful practice after they are fully licensed, so this effort now can pay dividends later…

I’ll be honest…If it weren’t for CSUN’s list of field sites in my area, CSUN’s long-standing relationships in the community that made agencies eager to hire CSUN students, and my field site coordinator’s assistance with understanding what characteristics I needed to be looking for in a field site, I don’t even know where I would have begun. I have no background in community mental health or even psychology, so I had never heard of any of the places that were on the list or came to the fair. If my program hadn’t proactively offered suggestions, I’m not sure how I would have started trying to find a site. So while I really admire Northcentral students who are successful in spearheading this process all on their own, I certainly empathize with any students who might struggle.

Client Hours

Another complicating factor is the sheer number and “type” of client hours you need to log for a COAMFTE program. I was able to find the May 2016 Northcentral academic catalog that spells out some of the requirements for the program, and here are the hours that Northcentral MFT students needed in May 2016:

• Client Contact – MAMFT students will be required to complete 500 hours of direct client contact, which includes conducting face-to-face therapy with individuals, couples, families, and groups. At least 250 hours of client contact must be relational (e.g., couple or family).

So, this is saying that students in the MFT program at Northcentral in 2016 needed to log 500 hours of working with clients—250 of those hours needed to be “relational,” or with more than one person in the room and all the people had to be in the same relational system (so a couple, or a family, or a couple other exotic configurations I’m not going to get into now).

These are based on COAMFTE’s standards (Northcentral required 250 relational hours, which is more than the COAMFTE-required 200). I recognize those standards, because I had to meet them at CSUN. Until very recently, COAMFTE programs adhered to what are called “Version 12.0" standards. Click that link if you’re into reading dense accreditation documentation, but in a nutshell, it spells out everything a COAMFTE school must provide and must require of students. I don’t know for sure what version Northcentral was using back in 2015-2016, but Version 12.0 has this same 500 hours/200 relational hours rule.

Here’s the thing—the State of California doesn’t have the same standard for MFT students. At minimum, California wants MFT students to have 225 hours of experience. And they don’t care if you don’t clock a SINGLE relational hour. So you could graduate with 225 hours of seeing individuals and California will congratulate you on your great success with marriage and family therapy.

But not COAMFTE.

Noooooo. COAMFTE wants more for you! COAMFTE wants you to clock 500 hours. And, 200 of those have to be with couples or families.

At my field site, which had trainees from multiple different MFT programs, I watched as my Antioch colleagues finished up their 225 hours in a year. But I had to log OVER TWICE as many hours before I could graduate. There were plenty of individual clients available at my site, but we trainees often had to jockey for available rooms and time slots, making it harder to get as many hours as I needed. And that’s not even as bad as it can get—I know that some of my classmates who ended up at smaller sites got clients only when they were the ones that happened to answer the front-desk phone when a prospective client called. If you’re not working at a site with a waiting list of clients, I can see how racking up those hours might be slow.

But the WORST part of collecting hours is those goddamn relational hours. Here’s the thing—there’s not a ton of families and couples seeking out counseling from grad-school trainees. Even at my site, which had a robust outreach program and a six-month waiting list for individual clients to match with the over 100 therapists, we practically had to cage-match each other for couples and families. There just weren’t enough to meet the needs of the few therapists who had to log relational hours.

It’s well-known that getting relational hours can be tough—that’s why many of my classmates chose sites at the LAUSD school district, because they could get tons of relational hours. Because remember, a relational hour is a very specific kind of hour. Here’s actually a great definition right from Northcentral’s student handbook:

• A relational therapy hour is when two or more people that have some type of relationship (e.g., husband/wife, parent/child, siblings, partners) are in the same session…Group therapy with individuals counts as an individual hour; group therapy only counts toward the required “relational” hours if the group involves multiple members of the same family (e.g., couples, parents, siblings). One hour of group therapy counts as one hour of direct client contact.

So you can’t just count any hour you work with a child, or every hour that you spend running a group. Fortunately, all of the organizations that had contracted with CSUN in the past were very familiar with the whole “relational hour” requirement, and even though it was slow-going for me to collect those hours at my site, at least they were prepared for me to need those hours. I can imagine that if you are in a part of the state where there isn’t a lot of “behavioral health infrastructure,” and it’s hard to find a field site anyway, it’s probably even harder to find one that can help you get 250 relational hours.

Supervision

Now remember, while you’re seeing these clients, you need to be supervised. Someone who is licensed basically has to take responsibility for your work (you work “under their license,” so if you mess up they are responsible). You meet with them for at least 100 hours if you’re in a COAMFTE program, and they sign all your paperwork. Non-COAMFTE students are also required to be supervised, but they don’t need as much supervision—because they’re required to do less than half the clinical hours. As Northcentral’s clinical handbook warns:

• In conjunction with client contact, MAMFT students must receive a total of 100 hours of supervision, at least fifty (50) of which will be face-to-face or live supervision conducted by an AAMFT Approved Supervisor(s), Supervisors-in-Training, or equivalent state-approved supervisor(s). In some cases, students may be required to pay for local supervision. This will depend on the clinical placement location, local clinical placement, and/or local supervisor they contract with to complete their practicum and internship requirements. The decision to pay for local supervision is entirely up to the student and not a requirement of Northcentral University.

At my site, I did pay a $70/month training fee that covered the extra trainings my site offered that I really want to attend, but I definitely didn’t have to pay for supervision. As Ben Caldwell writes on his excellent blog, it’s pretty controversial for a training site to charge trainees to work for free. But I justified it because my site offered extra training, and they had great relationships in the community that meant they were able to get lots of licensed therapists willing to volunteer their time to supervise trainees. In fact, I don’t know a single classmate who had to pay for supervision at ANY of their sites. I think most of the community agencies, at least in Los Angeles, have licensed therapists on-staff, getting paid a salary and benefits, and part of their job descriptions is to supervise the trainees who come in to provide therapy services for clients. In this way, the clinic gets like 8 therapists for every one salary! These clinics are eager to have trainees come work for them. But I wonder, if in more rural parts of the state, maybe agencies aren’t quite set up with trainees in mind. If there’s not a reliable source of trainees, the financial model of the organization can’t depend on them. Maybe they don’t have anyone whose job it is to supervise trainees, so perhaps they’d be ok with letting you earn hours there, but they don’t have any staff who can supervise you. In that case, you’d have to go find an off-site supervisor. Actually, Northcentral addresses this in their clinical handbook:

• Will I have to pay for clinical supervision? Maybe. Many students can find sites that offer supervision for free. In some instances, the sites where students want to do their clinical work do not have a qualified Local Clinical Supervisor, so the student needs to find an off-site supervisor, who may charge as much as they would for an hour of therapy. Students are not required to select a placement (site) that will require them to pay for supervision. Only loan money that is part of a stipend may be used to pay for local supervision. Students are advised to connect with their Academic and Financial advisor with any questions about their loan or stipend amount.

Look, I paid $70 per month and that was not easy, financially. What if I had to pay a supervisor their going rate for therapy every week?? I’d be LUCKY if it was only $70!!! It could probably be closer to $125/hour…every week…for 100 hours of COAMFTE-required supervision.

That’s…$12,500.

I’m not certain that’s what happened to the folks in the 2015-2016 Northcentral cohort who couldn’t finish the program, even given 6 years, but I would not blame anyone who was faced with that situation and had to drop out.

Paperwork

I know not everyone struggles with this the way I did, but there is a lot of logging of hours. I had the hardest time wrapping my head around the paperwork requirements for my school. My school’s hour logs were different from the state hour logs, I had a supervisor at the clinic but then my practicum instructor at CSUN was also a supervisor, I had to get signatures from all of them on every set of logs and every set of contracts—it was nerve-wracking. I had to keep track of how many hours I was getting, what kind of hours they were, and whether I was getting enough (and the right kind of) supervision in a given week to be able to count all my client hours that week. If I didn’t have my classmates occasionally saying, “it’s two hours of live, one hour of case report, just write it down” and pointing out which box to write what number in as I cried over my logs, I’m not sure I would have gotten through grad school. I cannot imagine how I would have completed my paperwork correctly without getting it constantly double-checked by my supervisors, my professors, and my friends. And if you don’t complete your paperwork correctly, and get all the right signatures in the right places, and keep track to make sure you’re getting enough (of the right kind of) supervision in each week, you can literally lose hours. Like, you maybe have done the therapy hours with clients, but if your paperwork isn’t right, you can’t count them. I’m a pretty self-directed individual, but I honestly don’t think I could have kept my paperwork straight if I was attending an online school. This is why I have major respect for every 2015-2016 Northcentral student who was able to graduate, but I honestly feel for those who maybe got totally bogged down in the red tape.

Finally… “live observation.”

This is the other requirement that is significantly different at COAMFTE programs than it is at other programs, and let me tell you, it’s kind of a nightmare. It’s probably one of the few things that I do believe results in a better education, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get it done.

One of COAMFTE’s Version 12.0 standards that COAMFTE programs must uphold is this:

• A commitment to clinical training, if part of a program’s mission, that includes clinical contact hours with individuals, couples, families, and other systems, with relationally oriented clinical supervision, that includes significant use of observable data (e.g., audio and video recordings, as well as observation of therapy during live supervision [behind the mirror, in the room co-therapy, reflecting teams, etc.]).

So, COAMFTE programs like CSUN and Northcentral meet this standard by requiring this (which comes from Northcentral’s current clinical handbook):

• At least 50 observable data (live, video, audio) supervision hours (supervision that involves their Local Clinical Supervisor’s live observation of their session with a client, or the student sharing their video or audio recording during supervision of their session with a client).

Here’s how this worked at CSUN:

• You can’t use your phone or any other device that has multiple uses, you have to have a dedicated device that is just for doing video or audio recordings of real client sessions, and it can’t save anything to the cloud. So CSUN bought these digital video cameras on Amazon and had them locked in these lockboxes, and you had to check them out from the program.

• You had to talk to your clients and ask them to consent to their actual therapy session being video recorded, have them sign paperwork, and log the paperwork in the client file as well as turn it in to the site and CSUN.

• Then you had to set up the camera and record your session.

• Then, before your next fieldwork class at school, you had to prepare a case presentation—select a piece of the video to present to the class and identify an issue you wanted feedback on.

• Then you would show the video clip in class and do your presentation, and finally erase the video file.

I actually loved the exercise itself of presenting my work—it forced me to watch myself doing real therapy, consider my strengths and weaknesses, and get observational feedback from my CSUN fieldwork supervisor. But I loathed the process of getting this all done. The camera situation was a total headache. Privacy is sacrosanct in therapy, and even though my site was set up for live observation, the front desk staff was super-suspicious that my school provided me with a camera that I removed from the premises to truck back to campus for case reports. I was already completely nervous to talk to my client about this, to actually record us doing therapy together, and then to be responsible for the footage as I tried to get it back to campus in one piece. The judgment and dirty looks from the staff (and some other non-COAMFTE trainees) at my site was incredibly difficult to handle and made me feel so awkward.

AND THIS WAS AT A SITE THAT WAS TOTALLY COOL WITH LIVE OBSERVATION.

Remember, non-COAMFTE programs don’t have to do this, so MOST MFT STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS.

So a lot of sites think it’s weird. And I am certain there are plenty of sites across the state that simply won’t accommodate videotaping or recording of clients (I even had a CSUN classmate who encountered this during her work at a domestic violence center). In fact, Northcentral’s clinical handbook addresses this:

• If no recording is allowed at all, the student will need to confirm that the Local Clinical Supervisor will provide direct observation of some of their clinical work either through co-therapy or observation of sessions as they occur. Students will need 50 hours of supervision that includes some form of direct observation (or review of their observable data) to complete the program requirements. Also, students would need a secondary placement where they can see a small number of clients and record some sessions for use in group supervision with their NCU Faculty…Students who are unable to record sessions at their site will need to find an additional site. Students who lose a site where they could record must find a new site. Any site must be fully approved, and all required documentation must be submitted and acknowledged before the student can enroll in additional clinical courses.

What they’re saying here is that if a site won’t allow video or audio recording, the site supervisor has to agree to do co-therapy (perform as a therapist in the room with the trainee and their client) or observe live sessions (probably through a one-way mirror, which most places don’t have). And then, the student still needs to be able to “see a small number of clients and record some sessions for use in group supervision with their NCU Faculty.” So if the site says no recording, but the site supervisor says, “I’ll watch you do a live session on-site,” the student still needs to find a second site that will allow recording, because they need to do some case reports for school.

And if it was tough finding the first site because of a lack of “behavioral health infrastructure,” how hard will it be to find a second site that is cool with recording client sessions???

So maybe those MFT students who couldn’t finish the Northcentral program in time back in 2015-2016 ran into some hiccups with the recording requirement. Maybe they couldn’t find a second site that would accommodate it. Maybe they had a hard time finding a site in the first place! Maybe they couldn’t get enough relational hours. Or maybe they struggled to earn more than double the amount of hours that other California MFT students need to log.

But wait! There’s good news!

Fortunately, there is one silver lining that current Northcentral students can enjoy—there’s a new version of the COAMFTE standards, Version 12.5 , that Northcentral has adopted, and it requires fewer client hours. So now Northcentral students only need to log 300 client hours and 100 relational hours, which is much closer to standard California requirements. However, because of how the accreditation process works, as of this writing (June 2022), some COAMFTE programs in California are still following Version 12.0 standards, which means that there may still be some COAMFTE programs in California that require the 500/200 situation.

The Bottom Line

I think I can understand how it might be possible that over half of the admitted students in Northcentral’s 2015-2016 cohort still hadn’t graduated after 6 years:

• It’s probably tough to find a field site at all in some places if your school isn’t taking care of it for you, particularly in more rural areas.

• A field site has to be set up to get some benefit from trainee therapists doing hours, otherwise it’s just a headache. Without CSUN’s reputation in the local community, I don’t know how easy it would have been to get sites to go through the vetting process.

• A supervisor is taking on a lot of risk when they voluntarily offer their license to cover a grad student who’s doing therapy for the first time—it’s probably tough to find supervisors willing to do this for free if they’re not being compensated by their agency. But I can’t imagine having to pay for supervision as a trainee.

• There are sites that are not willing to accommodate live observation requirements.

• It’s very complicated keeping track of all the paperwork, logs, and rules, and if you do your paperwork wrong, or get messed up with keeping track of your supervision, you might “lose” hours (because they aren’t valid).

• Even if everything works out, you still might end up scrambling for available hours at your site.

• The longer it takes you to complete your hours, the more you have to pay in tuition to stay enrolled in the class you have to be in so that you can see clients—and if you’re paying for supervision, the more you have to shell out for that.

I’m not trying to pick on Northcentral here—there are plenty of MFT programs in California that probably have worse student graduation rates. But they don’t need to publish their data! Northcentral, however, does, because it’s a COAMFTE program.

So…are COAMFTE programs the best?

COAMFTE students do need to jump through more hoops than non-COAMFTE students, so if you trust that those hoops equal a “better” MFT education, then…sure? But this situation with the 2015-2016 cohort is one of the things that gives me pause when people conflate “COAMFTE accreditation” with “the best available MFT program.” Several COAMFTE programs in the table above were able to graduate a huge majority of their 2015-2016 cohorts on time, and I think that might have to do with the fact that they are smaller in-person programs—they have fewer students to keep track of, and deep roots in the local community, so their student are supported in jumping through all the COAMFTE hoops. It seems like Northcentral’s MFT students that started in 2015-2016 perhaps didn’t have the same advantages, so in this example at least, COAMFTE accreditation isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to get the MFT education you signed up for.

But at least you can get a license in Mississippi!

COAMFTE programs have their advantages, and honestly, I have the benefit of having graduated from one. I would never tell someone that COAMFTE accreditation isn’t worth it—if you can successfully complete a COAMFTE-accredited program. I would argue that COAMFTE accreditation doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have a better grad school experience than at a non-COAMFTE program. But I will also concede that that it’s easier to get licensed in other states with a COAMFTE degree.

At the end of the day, if you’re going to go to a COAMFTE program, do your due diligence to make sure you know what you’re getting into. Not all vodka is Grey Goose. But hey, even Smirnoff can make a killer cosmo if you know what you’re doing!

Want to check out the COAMFTE-required Student Achievement Data for yourself? You can find it (as of this writing) at the sites below (even if you have to dig a little for it). If it’s no longer there, it is accessible somewhere on the website…as long as the program is still COAMFTE-accredited!

Alliant - Irvine
Alliant - Los Angeles
Alliant - Online (which was not around in 2015-2016)
Alliant - Sacramento
Alliant - San Diego
Chapman University
CSUN
Hope International
Loma Linda
Northcentral
San Diego State University
Touro Worldwide
University of San Diego