Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on Diogenes in Exile on May 12, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
This is part one of a series.
CACREP’s Gold Standard or Legal Overreach?
The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) has become the gatekeeper to licensure and top counseling jobs. A CACREP-accredited degree is now required to work with the Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Army, and the Tricare health system. In 27 states, CACREP is either the preferred or mandated route to becoming a licensed counselor. Its status is so dominant that non-accredited programs often claim to be “aligned with CACREP standards,” as a mark of legitimacy.
But as CACREP’s influence grows, so do the legal questions. Its recent push to limit the Counseling Compact—a multi-state agreement allowing counselors to practice across state lines—could violate federal antitrust laws. In this series, we’ll examine whether CACREP has crossed legal lines, what it means for the profession, and how the public could be paying the price.
A Letter Disappears
In September 2023, CACREP published a six-page open letter to the American Counseling Association (ACA), chastising it for characterizing CACREP’s efforts to limit the scope of who can work under the Counseling Compact as demanding and relentless. Within weeks of that letter being cited in my article at Minding the Campus, the document quietly vanished from CACREP’s website.
Initially, I assumed this was damage control. But as I dug deeper into the legal limitations on nonprofit organizations and the red flags raised under the Sherman Antitrust Act, I began to reconsider. The more I learned, the more the letter read like a roadmap for monopolization.
Fortunately, I saved a copy and shared it.
[RELATED: Your Tax Dollars Are Funding Bigoted Counseling Programs—Here’s How to Stop It]
From Standard-Setter to Gatekeeper
Originally established to promote educational quality, CACREP has grown into the most powerful entity in the counseling field. Today, it accredits 983 programs across 473 institutions. Its standards influence who gets licensed, who gets hired, and—critically—who gets excluded.
In its own words, CACREP sees its mission as “promoting professional competence … through the development of preparation standards.” But those standards have become increasingly ideological and exclusively required for licensure and employment. The requirement for 60 graduate credit hours—more than many master’s programs in medicine or engineering—is one such barrier. So is the insistence on a rigid “Professional Counselor” identity, narrowly defined by CACREP itself.
These standards aren’t just academic—they’re political. CACREP’s own standard and the resulting required textbooks reflect a specific Critical Social Justice, DEI orientation, including an explicit requirement for multiculturalism as foundational to counselor identity. Not all counselors or counseling programs agree with this direction, and some have declined CACREP accreditation as a result. Yet, CACREP continues to lobby—though it avoids that word—for its definition to become the only acceptable one.
The Open Letter’s Demands
The 2023 letter laid out CACREP’s position clearly:
Those granted the Privilege to Practice in the Counseling Compact should be licensed as Professional Counselors and not in other professions.
It referenced a 2010 report produced through collaboration with CACREP, the ACA, the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC), American Association of State Counseling Boards (AASCB), the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES), and other organizations. That report reiterated the ideological foundations of counseling and called for the formation of a “Professional Counselor identity,” a concept CACREP developed and implemented into its standard, including in curriculum and philosophical priorities.
The letter further insisted that states should reserve Compact privileges for those who mirror CACREP’s standards, even while claiming to “respect each state’s prerogative” to set licensure rules. This doublespeak—publicly endorsing state control while privately urging uniform exclusion of anything short of the CACREP standard—raises concerns not just of ethical overreach, but of legal misconduct.
[RELATED: Psychology Has Been Overtaken by a Dangerous and Pervasive Ideology]
The Risk to Competition
Why does this matter? Because under federal law, especially the Sherman Antitrust Act, group efforts to restrain trade or dominate a market can be illegal. Section 1 prohibits collusion between organizations to exclude competitors. Section 2 forbids monopolization or attempts to monopolize a market.
CACREP is not a government agency. It is a private nonprofit—one whose decisions can determine how much a degree costs, who will be recruited, who can teach, what’s in the curriculum, and what loans are available to pay tuition.
Its coordination with licensing bodies, credentialing boards, professional organizations, and educators creates a closed loop that increasingly shuts out competition, not on the basis of quality, but conformity.
Its swift removal of the open letter suggests CACREP knows the risks. The questions now are: Has it gone too far? And who pays the price?
What’s at Stake
When a single accreditor dominates a profession, it limits not just career mobility but public access to care. Counselors who train through other reputable programs—some with different theoretical orientations or less ideological coursework—find themselves locked out of licensure, jobs, and now even interstate practice.
Meanwhile, clients face fewer choices in a time of unprecedented demand for mental health services.
In Part Two, we’ll explore how CACREP’s dominance may violate antitrust laws—and why it’s time for lawmakers and professional organizations to take a closer look at who sets the standards, and why.
This is part 1 of a series. (Go to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
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