The jobs are there, and the students want them. Speech-language pathology, counseling, and clinical social work are among the fastest-growing health fields in the country, and the regional universities that serve working adults are well placed to train the people who fill them.
The catch is a step most people outside higher education rarely think about: the clinical placement. It’s one of the driving reasons the education technology company Risepoint bought Keypath Education’s North American operations in August 2026.
The demand sits in a few high-need fields
The numbers behind these programs are unusually strong. Speech-language pathology employment is projected to grow 17% from 2025 to 2035, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s far faster than the average occupation, with about 12,500 openings a year and a median wage near $97,870. Counseling is growing even faster, at 18% over the same decade and roughly 50,500 openings a year.
These aren’t niche credentials. They lead to licensed roles that schools, clinics, and hospitals are actively trying to fill, and for speech-language pathology, an aging population and rising autism diagnoses keep the need climbing. Clinical social work sits in the same bracket, a licensed field with steady demand and more openings than trained applicants.
Behind the growth is a shortage the federal government expects to deepen. The Health Resources and Services Administration projects that the supply of mental health counselors will meet only about 55% of demand by 2038, a gap of nearly 100,000 practitioners, and it projects a shortfall of roughly 77,000 addiction counselors alongside tens of thousands of clinical social workers and family therapists.
And the shortage is worst where it’s hardest to fix. HRSA finds that rural counties are far more likely than urban ones to have no behavioral health provider at all: 45% of rural counties have no psychologist, against 16% of urban counties. Speech-language pathology tells a similar story from another angle, with nearly 40% of these clinicians working in schools, where smaller districts can go a year or more without filling a post. Those are the communities regional universities are rooted in, and these are the fields where a graduate can move straight into a role a town has struggled for years to fill.
So why can’t a university just add these programs?
On paper, launching an online master’s in speech-language pathology or counseling looks like a matter of hiring faculty and building courses. The coursework is the straightforward part. Every one of these degrees also requires supervised clinical hours that a student has to complete in person, in a real clinic, under a licensed preceptor. Course content scales online. The supervised clinical hours are the hard part.
For an online program with students spread across a wide area, that one requirement turns into a logistics problem most campuses have never had to solve. Someone has to find, vet, and keep up relationships with clinical sites and supervisors in dozens of markets at once. Each of those relationships has to be real and current, with a site willing to take a student and a preceptor whose license and availability check out. Someone has to match each student to an appropriate placement, handle the credentialing and the compliance paperwork, and then do all of it again the next term for the next group of students. Multiply that by hundreds of students in a single cohort, and the coordination becomes a full-time operation in its own right. It’s ongoing work: every new cohort needs new placements, and every site relationship has to be maintained.
That’s why the clinical placement, not the curriculum, is usually what caps how many students a health program can enroll. A university can design an excellent counseling degree and still be unable to grow it, simply because it can’t place the students it would otherwise admit. Building that placement operation from nothing takes years. The barrier comes down to the sheer complexity of putting online students into supervised clinical settings across the map, term after term.
What the Keypath acquisition adds
This is the gap the Keypath acquisition is meant to help Risepoint close. Keypath spent more than a decade building the network a program can’t easily build for itself, and Risepoint has now brought its North American operations in-house.
Its more than 70 clinical placement professionals work with more than 28,000 preceptors and nearly 15,000 healthcare sites across all 50 states, and the operation has arranged more than 55,000 supervised placements at a 98% success rate. It supports more than 65 programs at over 20 partner universities, concentrated in fields such as speech-language pathology, counseling, clinical social work, and pharmacy.
For a university partner, the practical result is that support from Risepoint now reaches both ends of an online health program. Risepoint already helped regional universities move programs online and connect with the working adults who want them. With Keypath, that support can extend through to the placements that used to be the program’s hardest constraint. A university weighing whether to launch or expand a health program no longer has to build a national placement network from scratch. It can plug into one that already exists. In a field like speech-language pathology, where a student can’t graduate, sit for licensure, or practice without those supervised hours, that shift changes what is realistic.
A placement network turns clinical training from the reason a program stays small into a service the university can simply offer. It also compresses the timeline. Standing up the placement side alone could take a program years; with an existing network, a university can plan around capacity it can count on from the start.
None of this changes who owns the academic side. Curriculum, admissions, instruction, and financial aid remain the university’s, owned by the institution and its faculty. The degree is the university’s own, taught and approved by its own people, and the placement network supports that degree rather than standing in for any part of it. Students still learn from the same faculty and graduate with the same credential. What changes is the machinery behind the scenes that gets them into a clinic. That separation is protected by accreditation standards, which tie the credential to the institution that grants it and to the faculty who teach in it.
Benefits close to home
Because clinical placements happen in real clinics, the benefit tends to stay close to home. A student who completes practicum hours at a clinic in their county is more likely to work there after graduating, so a regional program that can place its students is also a regional program that can help staff its community’s schools, clinics, and hospitals. In the fields where the shortages run deepest, speech therapy in the schools, counseling and social work in rural counties with no provider at all, that link between where a student trains and where a clinician ends up is the whole reason the model works.
The effect can compound over time. A rural county that gains one counseling graduate this year, and another the next, slowly rebuilds a bench of local providers, drawn from residents who never had to leave to get trained. That’s a sturdier path to a staffed clinic than recruiting a stranger from out of state and hoping they stay.
The demand for these clinicians isn’t in question, and neither is the willingness of regional universities to train them. The bottleneck has been more stubborn: getting every online student through supervised clinical hours in the places they live. That’s the specific problem the Keypath acquisition is built to address. For the universities involved, it could help turn a program that was hard to grow into one they can actually scale, and in exactly the disciplines their communities are shortest on.
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