State-by-State – The Most Affordable Substance Abuse Counseling Master’s Degrees and Post-Degree Certificates in the Country

A master’s-level education in America today is a big-ticket item. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, for the 2021-22 school year, the typical grad student paid an average of $20,500 in tuition and fees. For a two-year master’s in substance abuse counseling, you can double that—putting you somewhere close to the cost of a new car, in total.

It’s also the case that many people with life experiences that compel them to go into substance abuse counseling aren’t the ones out buying new cars every other year. In fact, many of them are from places that have been hardest hit by the drug epidemic. That means coming from families that don’t necessarily have a lot of spare cash laying around to help fund a graduate education.

So the odds are high that you are looking at this big career-boosting step with a couple of different goals in mind: the desire for a high-level education to put your counseling skills on par with the top professionals in the country, and a need to get that education on a budget.

We’ve put together a list of options here that will check both of those boxes for you.

Why a Graduate-Level Education in Substance Abuse Counseling is the Cards for Many Career-Focused Professionals

Thirty-seven states require a master’s degree to hit the top-level substance use disorder (SUD) counseling credential available, so you’ll find programs that cater to that requirement in most states. In most of the remaining states, it takes a bachelor’s degree to reach that level.

But simply having the right level of degree isn’t everything. If your degree was in social work, or psychology, or any number of different behavioral science or human services fields, there may be some SUD-specific courses you still need to take to meet state credentialing requirements. This is where the post-degree certificate in substance abuse counseling comes in.

Post-bachelor’s and post-master’s certificates in addiction treatment provide a high level of education for those who already meet their state’s degree requirement, but still need that slate of advanced SUD counseling courses.

Although certificates offer a more streamlined and often lower-cost option than a full degree, many of those programs can come at a premium too.

How We Pin-Pointed the Most Affordable Master’s Degrees and Post-Degree Certificates in Substance Abuse Counseling

Some schools present the full total cost of a program. Others show annual costs, or semester or quarter rates. Still others present the per-credit rate based on either a semester- or quarter-credit system, allowing for the possibility that a program may go a bit shorter or longer based on specialties or elective selections.

So in order for us to find a common unit of measurement for an apples-to-apples comparison, we often had to look deeper than the marketing material.

To find a comparable total for each program, we started by digging into the published data on per-credit graduate tuition rates for each school, then multiplied that by the full number of credits required to graduate.

For the relatively few schools that operate on a quarter system, we did a simple conversion (1.5 quarter-credits = 1 semester-credit) to bring them into alignment. This is the same simple formula universities on the semester system usually use when transferring in credits from schools on the quarter system. We then grouped programs by state and came up with the average in each state.

Since you will be selecting from programs designed to meet credentialing requirements in your state, there’s no sense in bringing programs from the other side of the country into the cost equation.

Then in the spirit of simplicity, we included every program that came in with a total cost within $1000 of the state average, and popped it on the list.

And to give you the most meaningful cost analysis possible, we separated public and private schools in each state, coming up with a separate average for each. Because of the differences in funding and overhead costs between public and private universities, and the fact that residential rates at public universities can dramatically reduce the cost of attendance for in-state students, even similar programs can have significantly different costs at state universities versus elite private schools.

Of course, we provide you with the cost data for each program, and for schools that actually come in below the average, we tell you by how much, so you can see your total savings.

Cost Isn’t Everything When It Comes to Substance Abuse Counseling Education

While you may have a strict budget to stick to you to make sure your personal finances pencil out while earning your master’s in substance abuse counseling, that doesn’t mean you need to just pick the cheapest option on the list and hope for the best.

Every college has its own strengths and weaknesses. And every student brings their own dreams and goals to school with them. So you will find that there are options even within this list of affordable universities that may be a better or worse fit for you.

That’s why we give you a big infodump on all the other elements that go into a substance abuse counseling education beyond cost. For every school, you’ll find details on: