Library Journal ran a column on the value of the MLS degree to budding librarians which seems to have caused a bit of a reaction among readers, some of which really makes you wonder about the type of education certain ALA-accredited programs are offering. Descriptors such as ‘dull’ ‘unnecessary’, ‘poor value’ are thrown about regularly and there is a strong sense that many graduates received little real education and merely acquired debt and the required membership card for some jobs.
The broad issue at stake here is just how well accreditation works and just what some programs are seeing fit to provide their students. When two major online programs are churning out close to half the accredited students that more than 50 schools graduated in total 10 years ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking the job market was booming. Think again. I don’t know where most of these folks go but I am fairly sure some of them are among the posters at that LJ site.
At Texas, we graduate around 100 masters students a year. Less than half go to work in libraries and archives, the traditional collection agencies of employment, but those that do are well equipped to contribute. The others go into a mix of roles that is not simply reduced to a few job titles, most are singletons, serving as some type of information specialist in a management, design, organization, or service function. It is not clear that these folks need an ALA-accredited degree but they certainly benefited from our education. And we do offer an education, not job training. And that’s just the problem: does accreditation really assess or evaluate the important qualities of a program or just the appearance of a process?