The other day the Loon read a short article about applying to library jobs that scoffed at applicants who try to trade on the supposed prestige of their library school. Those library schools, they’re all the same; it doesn’t matter which one you went to, because no one you’re talking to will care.

Well. Yes. And also no.

It is unequivocally true that school prestige makes very little difference on the job market. (One exception: some employers still look askance at distance-education programs. The Loon’s advice is simply not to advertise that you attended one, if you did. Don’t lie if asked about it; just don’t volunteer the information.) Here and there you’ll find an individual who has a hate on for his or her own library school, or (far more rarely) has an educated opinion about one or two, positive or negative, but for the most part, prestige doesn’t buy you so much as a cup of coffee.

(It’s worth noting at this point that the much-followed US News and World Report rankings are determined by precisely the research-focused, out-of-touch-with-praxis, teaching-averse sorts that library-school students tend to dislike most. Ignore those rankings. They are the worst sort of pseudo-data trash. Be aware of the Loon’s bias, however: the school where she teaches has not ranked very highly of late.)

What does differ? Faculty and staff, obviously. Culture and values. Focus on research versus focus on teaching. Specialties and weaknesses. Overall teaching quality, with the caveat that every school has pockets of both brilliance and despair, so you want to find the schools whose pockets of brilliance coincide with your career aspirations. Advising quality (sadly, more often “lack thereof”). Availability and quality of career-related services and advising; some schools agree with the Loon that getting you a job is our mission, but some don’t.

Why do the differences matter? Well, one of the things you’ll have to do when you interview for jobs is talk the talk. You will have to convince your interviewers with nothing more at hand than your knowledge, your experience, and your ability to communicate them that yes, you are a librarian or archivist or records manager or whatever you are. Moreover, because of long-standing tendencies to new-hire messianism among employers, you will be expected to be au courant and technology-savvy, perhaps quite a bit more so than existing staff. Is this unfair? Certainly. Does it mean you’d better attend a school that gets you to that level, no matter where you started? Absolutely. Will every school do that? … not necessarily. Caveat discipulus.

This also means that anyone who tells you “it doesn’t matter what you take” is dangerously wrong and should not be heeded. If the teller is your library-school advisor, toss him or her back into the lake like a half-rotted fish and find someone better. It matters. If you are not well-versed in the ways of libraries or archives, you need different coursework than someone who is. If you are, do not skate by on courses that teach you nothing, designed for people without your experience; enhance your employability, instead, by skating to where the puck will be via courses that add a New Hotness or two to your résumé. (Keep your New Hotnesses relevant to your career goals, however. If you’re gunning for youth services, “Linked Data for Librarians” is a witless course to take. “Gaming and Gamification for Librarians” is a much more sensible choice. You can’t always heed working professionals about this, incidentally, as they are horribly prone to Everyone Must Take My Interest syndrome.) If you’re tech-phobic or don’t (know how to) work well with others, fix it.

Bluntly: if you skate, or your library school lets you skate, or can’t advise you properly, or just doesn’t bother, or doesn’t socialize you to typical professional environments, or doesn’t have the coursework you need to be competitive, you’re at a significant disadvantage on the job market. Experience may narrow the gap, but not always and not necessarily reliably. (The Loon has awful stories on this point; please do not make her retell them.) Prestige won’t narrow the gap one millimeter.

How do you choose both school and coursework wisely, then?

The Loon is convinced that many prospective students need to know more about library and archive employment than they do when they walk in the door of library school. (How to fix this is less clear; the Loon is thinking about it. We already privilege people with relevant experience for admission and look for cluefulness in your admissions essay; that’s only common sense.) Minimally, prospective students, you need to have read a lot of job ads for information jobs. The less you know about information jobs and the workplaces in which they are found, the more job ads you need to read. What excites you? What looks horrifically boring or difficult? What do you have all or nearly all the qualifications for except the degree? What looks fun, but a stretch? Now, in which kinds of workplaces do the jobs that look interesting cluster, if they do? At this point, you have learned two things: what careers you’re interested in (no, “librarian” is nowhere near specific enough!) and what kind of library (etc.) you are aiming at.

Armed with that, you need a better source of information about library schools than US News. Library Journal posts some worthwhile (though grain-of-salt-worthy) comparative job placement information yearly (here is 2012’s), but the Loon suggests that you dig a bit deeper: look for an ALA accreditation report (it may be called a “self-study,” an “annual progress report,” or even a “biennial narrative report”) on school websites. Finding them will probably take careful search-engine manipulation; they tend not to be prominent. These are a goldmine of information about what the school teaches, how it thinks, what its research and teaching specialties are, and where its students wind up after graduation. Do not be too swayed by a report that is unabashedly positive; suspect instead that smoke is being blown up someone’s cloaca. Prefer honesty, a school that talks about the bad with the good.

Don’t forget that you can call and email library schools! You will probably be directed to someone whose job it is to shepherd students into and through the program. Ask about program strengths. Ask for the latest accreditation report. Ask what the latest batch of topics courses have been (this is one way you find out how au courant the school is). Ask what they teach in the areas you’re interested in, and who teaches it. Ask for contact information for some alumni you can talk to—yes, they will be chosen for their excellence and the good things they may say about the school, but trust the Loon, they’ll be honest about its shortcomings too.

The Loon has one more yardstick, an admittedly idiosyncratic one: find out how the school teaches introductory-level technology courses. “Tech of the week” courses (HTML this week, SQL next, Javascript the week after, XML after that…) are a critically bad sign. The Loon has never, not once, heard such a course praised; conversely, she has often heard students express bewilderment, fear, and disinclination toward technology after taking one. Technology is too important to your career to allow this to happen! Write off a school that teaches it this way if you possibly can; the Loon is as serious as she knows how to be. The intro course you want is lighter on the eggheadiness (though it should still be a little eggheady) and heavier on the social context of technology, technology law, a broad sense of library- and archive-specific technologies, and meta-technology skills such as project management, software/service choice, tech-skill (and tech help) acquisition, and technology-related advocacy.

Can you get by in a school that is not a perfect fit for your career goals? Often, yes, and many students do because they must. (The Loon’s school does not specialize in research-data management, but the Loon has managed to train up and place a few data managers nonetheless.) It’s obviously not ideal, and you risk a less coherent and less useful program, but that can be overcome. If this is your situation, find out whether your school participates in the WISE Consortium, and absolutely find out how many courses your program lets you take outside the library school. Take full advantage of both possibilities.

Can you get by even in a school that is a flaming hot mess? Yes, but it seriously handcuffs you, and you’ll hate it. Enough said on that sad subject… well, just one more thing: “flaming hot mess” is partly contextual. A brilliant iSchool may be a flaming hot mess for a tech-phobic cataloger-to-be. A youth-librarianship–centered school may be a flaming hot mess for a future systems administrator. Only a very few schools are flaming hot messes more or less universally—and yes, they are to be avoided when possible.

The Loon is of two minds on the “follow the professor” program- and course-choice strategy—and she says this as someone on whom quite a few students imprint like loon-chicks. If the excellent instructor teaches courses that align with your career interests, go there and take more courses from him or her—that’s a no-brainer! If not, only favor that person if you are quite, quite sure that the courses aligned with your career goals will be so poorly-taught as to be a complete waste of time. Follow-the-professor can be a good strategy for finding an advisor, however; affability, willingness to go to bat for you, and the ability to find out things they don’t already know on your behalf (about the program, or about a specialty job market they’re not familiar with) all go a long way.

Which school you go to matters. What courses you choose also matters. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

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