Merrimack College has launched the Graduate School of Counseling and Social Work, marking a significant milestone in Merrimack’s transformation into a leading research university.
This is the College’s first school dedicated to graduate studies. It continues Merrimack’s commitment to academic rigor, research, professional development and community engagement, enhanced by the College’s founding Catholic Augustinian values of scholarship and service.
“This is an exciting time in Merrimack College’s transformative growth,” said President Christopher E. Hopey, Ph.D. “This new school represents a strong investment in Merrimack’s expanding graduate education and will be a bedrock of the culture we are fostering here. At its core, this school will prepare future generations of valued and respected leaders in counseling and social work to make meaningful impacts in the communities they serve.”
The new graduate school houses master’s programs in clinical and mental health counseling, social work and school counseling. These already existing programs boast more than 500 students collectively. In just the past few years, all three programs have seen tremendous enrollment growth, thanks in part to online offerings. From fall 2022 to fall 2024, clinical mental health online enrollment went up more than 500 percent, while school counseling experienced a 78 percent increase in online enrollment from 2024 to 2025.
Michael Mobley, previously the director of the clinical mental health counseling program, has been tapped to serve as the new school’s inaugural academic dean.
“In terms of bringing these programs together under one roof, it is because at the heart of each of them is a focus on establishing supportive, therapeutic and caring relationships,” said Mobley. “The students who graduate from our programs will go on to help individual clients, students, and families set and achieve goals based on the type of change they desire in their lives.”
The Graduate School of Counseling and Social Work is Merrimack’s sixth school, joining the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Nursing and Health Sciences, the School of Engineering and Computational Sciences, the School of Education and Social Policy and the Girard School of Business.
This new school helps to fulfill a key initiative in Merrimack’s strategic plan, the Agenda for the Future, to expand the College’s value proposition for graduate students and enhance its academic reputation through the integration of graduate education and research.
Merrimack College has experienced tremendous growth at the graduate level over the past 10 years. With just over 300 graduate students in 2014, Merrimack now boasts more than 2,500 students studying in programs including computer science, data science, business analytics and nutrition.
The new graduate school is also important to Merrimack’s efforts to achieve R2 classification from the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. The classification designates a higher education institution as a doctoral university-high research activity, of which there are only 133 in the U.S. To earn R2 status, a university must award at least 20 doctoral degrees annually. The Graduate School of Counseling and Social Work will serve as a hub for the development of doctoral programs at Merrimack.
