Fielding Graduate University

Our global, distributed community of professionals is dedicated to lifelong learning, social justice and innovation, and advancement for individuals, organizations, communities, and society.

Our curriculum offers quality degrees and courses for professionals living and working anywhere in the world. Fielding faculty members represent a breadth of scholarship and practice within the fields of psychology and leadership.

We are an innovative global community dedicated to educating scholars, leaders, and practitioners in pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. We provide exemplary interdisciplinary programs within a distributed and relational learning model grounded in student-driven inquiry and leading to enhanced knowledge. This community of scholar-practitioners addresses personal, organizational, societal, ecological, and global concerns in pursuit of a more just and sustainable world.

Fielding's administrative offices are located in two lot-adjacent office buildings in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. To enrich your educational experience, many of Fielding's programs hold face-to-face events throughout the year in different regional locations. Our Academic Conferencing & Events Department contracts with hotels and other educational spaces such as retreat centers to provide suitable spaces for your learning and engagement with faculty. Fielding Graduate University was founded by three friends: Frederic Hudson, Hallock Hoffman, and Renata Tesch–all distinguished higher–education administrators and educators.

Here at Fielding Graduate University, we are different from other graduate schools. Taking a multidisciplinary, principles-centered, values-based, and inclusive approach to leadership and practice, we prize process along with effective outcomes. Whether our graduates become psychologists, educators, organizational development consultants, coaches, or practitioners, they acknowledge the evolutionary nature and interconnectedness of solving today’s problems. Leadership competencies, such as being skillful in emotional and social intelligence, decision-making judgement, and conflict management, are combined with area expertise to create uniquely qualified graduates and leaders in whatever sphere they may find themselves over their life’s journey.

We offer both in-person and online student and technology services that allow students to fully delve into their research and knowledge interests. Every environment is designed with your success in mind.

For generations, Fielding has been graduating scholar-practitioners who know that research is not an end in itself, but that it serves a broader purpose. Tested, applied, and used for broader application, Fielding research tackles the tough societal problems all around us. We ask big, broad and complex questions—because it is bold scholarship that makes a positive social difference. New knowledge for practical application is the Fielding difference.

The Office of Strategic Initiatives & Research (SIR), under the Office of the Provost, helps faculty, staff, and students promote and secure sponsored research funding to foster research that leads to lasting positive change. This office seeks to foster new efforts to enhance Fielding’s reputation and quality of its academic offerings through special initiatives. Many of these efforts are expanded through the creation of institutional partnerships and organizational connections that that assure Fielding’s presence in national discussions on higher education policy and priorities and in programs that advance graduate education. Many of these initiatives are designed to create opportunities for Fielding’s academic programs and their faculties, students and alumni to further new frontiers of scholarship, curriculum and practice within and across their disciplines.

As innovators in adult education we take concepts of developmental learning and apply them in our mentoring and advising relationships with students; forging new ways to help you connect with what you already know, what you need to know, and how to get you there. Fielding was on the forefront of using technology to deliver an educational experience, and we continue to find ways to enhance the best of what we do with cutting-edge ideas and media-rich learning.

From our online library to our student advising, tuition, financial aid, registrar and help-desk support areas, Fielding staff strive to make our support services to students useful and timely. Accommodations for students with disabilities and study aids for all students are available.

A mainstay of our learning ideology from the beginning, face-to-face sessions between students and faculty held throughout the US and globally are a critical way of how we connect and re-connect within and across our disciplines. And they are usually great mini-vacation spots too.

The founders speculated that students seeking advanced degrees would be mid-career adults who wanted to enhance already well-established academic and professional skills; who would be committed to effecting a mid-life career change; and who would be interested in being part of a lifelong-learning community.

The traditional pedagogical method of education–active teacher, passive learner–would not be appropriate to this new experiment. To accommodate and capitalize on the learning styles of its students, Fielding developed a rigorous, supportive learning model that today remains flexible, adult-centered, self-directed, practice-oriented, global, and competence-based.

Fielding’s School of Psychology offers the only accredited (on probation) clinical psychology doctoral program using a distributed delivery model. The program is accredited (on probation) by the American Psychological Association (APA Commission on Accreditation, 750 First St. NE, Washington, DC 20002, 202.336.5979). The clinical psychology program received initial accreditation by the APA in 1991.

Fielding Graduate University is accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).