Licensure Archives - Page 7 of 16

Why is license exam prep material so expensive?

July 9, 2018 by Ben Caldwell

Becoming a therapist is ridiculously expensive. There’s grad school, which costs about five times as much even in inflation-adjusted dollars today than it did 30 years ago. There’s the time between graduation and licensure, which is often filled with low-paying employment. And then at the end of all of that, you take your final license exam. (Some states have bumped up some exams to be earlier in the process.) Given all the expense that leads up to it, it’s common to wonder why that last major hurdle is itself so expensive. If your education and experience should have prepared you for licensure, why should you have to do license exam prep courses in addition? And if you do go the test-prep route, why is it so expensive?

Let’s take those questions in order.

MFT licensure: Why 3,000 hours?

June 27, 2018 by Ben Caldwell

Whenever I get into conversations about the MFT licensure process, and how it differs from one state to another, similar questions come up. Earlier I addressed the fundamental question of whether license examinations make for better therapists. Another common question I hear: Why do we require 3,000 hours of supervised, prelicensed experience for MFT licensure?

(Making things more complicated, why do some states require more? California uses the 3,000-hour standard. Arizona, like a handful of other states, requires 3,200 hours. Some other states simply say “two years of full-time supervised experience or the equivalent.”)

Senioritis: The last stretch of hours before licensure

June 25, 2018 by Emma Jaegle

Brodie Vissers / Burst / Used under license We all remember the last semester of high school. A new life chapter was approaching. Our childhood was ending. We would soon experience the freedom of the college world.

It was scary to know that we would be on our own, but we were itching to leave. We knew the quality of our work did not reflect what we were capable of, we just wanted it out of the way. I even remember calculating how much I had to do to just barely pass my classes and coast through the rest of my school year. It did not matter that more difficult times and more responsibility were imminently ahead of us, we just wanted to be done with high school. We called it “senioritis.”

Nearing the end of your 3,000 hours towards licensure can be eerily similar.