The Honest Guide

Becoming a Therapist in California: An Honest Guide

The questions every program website leaves out, answered with real data and no sales pitch.

Free to read No sign-up Sources cited

Four free tools

Built from the chapters, so you can run your own numbers.

Take-home pay calculator

Real after-tax, after-loan pay by credential and region.

Chapter 1

Program scorecard

Score and compare the schools you are weighing.

Chapter 8

Licensure lookup

Requirements by state: degree, hours, and exams.

All states

Should you become a therapist?

A ten-minute read on whether this path fits you.

Self-assessment

Who wrote this, and what we have at stake

Three of us wrote this guide, and you should know our interest. We work at Sentio University, a nonprofit graduate school in Los Angeles that trains marriage and family therapists, and programs exist to enroll students. So we made some rules: the guide covers every path into the field, not only the one we teach, we cite our sources, and when we move from fact to opinion we say so. Two views you will notice: we favor training that is hands-on and practice-based, and we have opinions about AI, which we save for the last chapter.

Dr. Tony Rousmaniere
President and Program Director, Sentio University
Dr. Alexandre Vaz
Chief Academic Officer and Faculty Supervisor
Mikaela Abundez
Director of Student Services

Thinking about an MFT in California?

Read the guide first. If you want to see how Sentio measures up against its own criteria, take a closer look.

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