SURVEY METHODS

The LJ placement and salaries survey provides a valuable professional snapshot of the job-seeking experiences of graduates and their institutions as a service to the LIS community. LJ invited each of the 52 American Library Association-accredited library and information science schools located in the United States to participate in the annual placement and salary survey. Thirty-six schools chose to participate in this assessment by providing information about their 2019 graduates. 31 of these schools participated by sending a link for the LJ online survey to all of their 2019 graduates. The other five participating schools chose to conduct their own independent assessment of their graduates, and then shared these results with LJ: San José State, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Kent State, and Catholic University. The results from the assessments conducted independently by these five schools did not necessarily include all of the questions used in the LJ survey.

The data analyzed for this article are the aggregation of responses from 26 percent of the 4,263 total graduates reported by the 36 schools that participated this year. This year’s respondent base is slightly smaller than last year.

Response rates for individual schools varied widely. Among the schools that forwarded the LJ survey to their graduates, response rates varied from a high of 54 percent to a low of 10 percent. LJ requires that a 10 percent threshold be met. Graduates’ response rates to the independent school assessments ranged from 10 percent to 92 percent.

This year, 15 schools chose not to participate in the survey or did not respond to calls for participation: Clarion University, University of Denver, Dominican University, Drexel University, University of California–Los Angeles, East Carolina University, Indiana University–Bloomington, Louisiana State University, North Carolina Central University, University of North Carolina–Greensboro, Queens College, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rhode Island, University of South Carolina, and University of Texas–Austin. One school, Florida State University, failed to meet the 10 percent threshold of graduates required for participation.

Canadian LIS programs conduct their own assessments and do not participate in the LJ annual survey. This includes programs at Alberta, British Columbia, Dalhousie, McGill, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Western Ontario. The University of Puerto Rico also does not participate.

LIMITATIONS

The purpose of this report is to provide the LIS professions with a snapshot of the graduates’ experiences entering the job market, and to identify potential trends in comparison to prior years of the study. It is not a comprehensive examination of all employment outcomes. The applicability of the survey findings is limited because graduates’ participation in the study is self-selected rather than constituting a representative sample and the survey questions on the independent surveys administered by the schools may be slightly different. Data from some LIS schools may be incomplete, and other schools chose not to participate. Not all LJ administered surveys were complete because graduates were allowed to skip any question on the survey or leave the survey without completing it.