What Makes CIIS Different From Other Graduate Schools?

Choosing a graduate school shapes more than your career. It changes how you understand yourself and how you engage with the world. If you’ve ever felt that something was missing from conventional academic programs — a deeper sense of purpose, a space for spiritual exploration, a real investment in social justice — California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) may be the place you’ve been looking for.

CIIS has spent more than five decades guiding scholars, healers, activists, and practitioners through an educational model unlike any other. This community of learners ventures beyond traditional academic boundaries in order to create meaningful change: in themselves first, and then in the communities and systems around them.

An Integral Approach to Learning

At the heart of CIIS is integral education — an approach that honors the full dimensionality of the human experience. Rather than isolating knowledge into rigid academic silos, integral education engages the whole person: cognitive and emotional life, yes, but also the physical, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions that most graduate programs leave out.
 

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We don't know only with our minds. We also know through our emotions, our body — somatic knowing — through our will, through intuition, collectively, through introspection. CIIS is forging the creation of scholarly language for these different forms of knowing.
Debashish Banerji, Haridas Chaudhuri, Professor and Chair, East-West Psychology

This isn’t a loose or unstructured philosophy. Integral education at CIIS combines the rigor of Western scholarship with the depth of Eastern and Indigenous wisdom traditions. Contemplative practices and empirical inquiry inform and strengthen one another. 

A Community Built on Curiosity and Purpose

One of the most distinctive qualities of CIIS is its community. The University attracts people who are driven by questions that other institutions may not have space for: What is consciousness? How do we heal intergenerational trauma? What does it mean to live in alignment with our deepest values?
 

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Faculty, students, and alums describe a culture of radical curiosity — one where the biggest questions aren’t obstacles to overcome but doorways to walk through. Students are encouraged to bring their full selves to their work, and personal transformation becomes part of the academic process, not separate from it.

Three Schools, Many Pathways

CIIS organizes its academic offerings across three schools, each grounded in the integral approach. The School of Consciousness and Transformation explores philosophy, consciousness, spirituality, and cosmology. The School of Professional Psychology and Health prepares students for careers in clinical psychology, counseling, integrative health, and expressive arts therapy. The School of Undergraduate Studies has bachelor’s completion programs that weave real-world experience into academic inquiry.
 

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The schools are intentionally interdependent. A student training to become a licensed therapist sits in community with a doctoral candidate studying consciousness and a working professional completing their undergraduate degree. That’s unusual for a university, and it’s by design.

Rooted in San Francisco, Accessible From Anywhere

CIIS is headquartered in San Francisco, where in the 1960s, Eastern spirituality and Western psychology converged to give birth to new models of consciousness and well-being. CIIS was born from that convergence, and its campus still draws energy from the city’s progressive culture, diverse communities, and clinical training sites.

CIIS was founded by Haridas Chaudhuri, who was chosen by Sri Aurobindo to bring integral philosophy to the West — to San Francisco at a time when the beat poets were there, Alan Watts was in the mix.
Matthew Segall, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness

But you don’t have to live in San Francisco to study at CIIS. The University offers programs in three formats: fully online with no in-person requirements, hybrid programs that combine online coursework with periodic in-person intensives, and traditional on-campus programs. The majority of CIIS’ 30-plus programs are available online or in hybrid format, making the integral approach accessible to students across the country. For hybrid students, in-person gatherings in San Francisco become concentrated moments of community and practice — a chance to connect face-to-face with the people and place that ground the University’s work.

Committed to What Matters Most

CIIS is guided by seven institutional commitments that shape daily life at the University:

1. Embody integral approaches to learning and research
2. Affirm and elevate spirituality
3. Advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and social and ecological justice
4. Embrace multiple ways of knowing, learning, and teaching
5. Cultivate innovation and sustainability
6. Nurture and support a flourishing and cohesive community
7. Foster transformative integral governance

These aren’t aspirational statements. They are lived practices that shape how courses are designed, how students are supported, and how the University engages with the world beyond its walls.

Begin Your Journey

Graduate school is a big decision. CIIS is for people who want their education to be as expansive as their questions — people who believe that inner work and outer action belong together, and that the classroom should honor the whole person. If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.
 

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