The Top 25 Affordable Online Master’s Degrees in School Counseling

Here we have put together a list of the best low-cost online master’s degrees in school counseling. School Counselors work in the elementary, middle, and high school settings. An online master’s degree in school counseling from one of the low-cost graduate programs listed here will prepare graduates to provide advocacy, assessment, evaluation, personal, social, developmental, academic and career counseling to students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Along with providing a broad range of services, school counselors work with a diverse population of individuals including not only students and teachers but also parents, school staff, administrators, coaches, and community members.

Most of the low-cost online master’s degrees in school counseling listed here require students to complete an internship and practicum experience. The internship and practicum is generally designed to be completed in your home town and is incorporated into the program curriculum to be manageable for all students. Practicum and internship experiences provide students with valuable hands on learning experiences, in a school setting, allowing students to gain clinical and professional skills.

Another requirement that is common among online counseling programs, including many of the low-cost online master’s degrees in school counseling listed here, is the residency requirement. Residencies provide online counseling students the opportunity to engage in face-to-face on campus learning opportunities with peers and faculty. Residencies often take place once or twice for a few days to a week at a time during the course of the program. Students typically report that residencies provided invaluable learning opportunities as well as connections with peers and faculty that they feel appreciative of.

One final thing to consider for students interested in online counseling programs is licensure and accreditation. All of the schools on this list are regionally accredited, in addition many of the schools listed here are also accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP ). Accredited programs generally provide graduates with an advantage of having completed specifically required coursework when applying for licensure, streamlining the licensure process. Regardless of the program you choose, all students are encouraged to contact their home state’s licensing board to determine if the online master’s program they are interested in meets their home state’s licensing and certification requirements.

We are confident you will find the best low-cost online master’s degree in school counseling to meet your academic and career goals here! For more information about the methodology used for this ranking, please see the methodology section at the end of he article.

Methodology:

• A list of schools offering programs in Counselor Education / School Counseling & Student Counseling was gathered using the NCES College Navigator database.
• Only schools that offered these programs as Distance Education were selected.
• From this list, each school's regional accreditation was gathered and only schools that were regionally accredited remained.
• Then each school's website was searched to confirm if a counseling programs was indeed offered on line. Schools that didn’t have counseling programs offered online were removed from the list.
• Each school's Graduate tuition per credit hour was obtained from the schools's web site. The lowest tuition rate was listed for schools that offered multiple programs with multiple tuition rates.

See also: The 50 Best Low-Cost Online Master’s in Counseling Programs