Alabama Library Jobs

Fortunately, a couple of Kind Readers corrected my oversight, sort of. They sent in a link to this blog post discussing the salary data. The LJ article has “Details on jobs and pay for 2012 LIS grads, broken down by region, type of role, school, and more.” Those details aren’t good.

The saddest table has to be table 3, total graduates and placements by school. If you’re thinking about library school and are concerned about placement rates, definitely take a look at this.

If you’ve been a librarian for a long time and want to know how different things are from when you graduated, also take a look and rejoice that you don’t have to face the market these grads have to face today.

Where would you want to go today, at least based on placement rates? Well, the best placement rates seem to come from schools that ignored the LJ survey and provided their own placement data. That they’re savvy enough to do that should tell you something, although I’m not sure what.

Michigan, for example, claimed 166 graduates in 2012, with 140 placements. Wisconsin (Madison) claimed 78 graduates with 54 placements.

On the other hand, Wisconsin (Milwaukee), which didn’t contribute its own data, had 225 graduates and only 49 placements. So you can see how important it is for library schools to submit their own figures rather than rely on the survey.

Plenty of the schools have placement rates under 20%. Examples (Graduates/Placements) include:

Alabama (135/22), Buffalo (155/11), Florida State (226/25), Kent State (230/34), North Texas (464/39), Pitt (190/20), Pratt (158/27) San Jose (559/116) South Carolina (134/12), St. John’s (21/1), Texas Women’s (181/19), and Washington (127/22).

The saddest case has to be Long Island University. I didn’t even know they had a library school. Employers don’t seem to know, either. Graduates: 163. Placements: 2. Ouch.

Even some of the top schools by rank, as long as they’re not supplying their own data, aren’t doing so well. Illinois’s placement is about 32%, North Carolina about 30%, Syracuse at 36%. Rutgers is doing a bit better at 45%, Simmons at 53%, Texas at 52%.

I was a little shocked at the size of some programs. North Texas and San Jose graduate nearly 17% of the total graduates surveyed of the 40 or so library schools. They placed about 9% of the total.