The MLS Is Not the Problem: A Response

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Ben Rawlins, Associate Dean for Outreach, Engagement and Collections at the University of Kentucky Libraries.

Bryn Geffert’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay argues that the MLS degree is an obstacle to hiring, a barrier to diversity, and an increasingly optional credential in academic libraries. His survey data from R1 and R2 institutions is real, and the hiring challenges he documents are real. His diagnosis, however, misses the mark, and his argument carries implications that deserve more scrutiny than the piece provides.

I write as an Associate Dean at an R1 research institution where librarians hold faculty status, where I have been involved in hiring, mentoring, and evaluating MLS-holding colleagues for years. My concern is not with the idea that library education needs to improve. It most certainly does. My concern is with the slide from that legitimate observation to the conclusion that the credential itself is the problem.

The MLS Is a Formation Credential

Geffert treats the degree primarily as a skills-delivery mechanism, then faults it for not delivering every skill administrators want. The MLS is not principally a skills credential. It is a professional formation credential. The ALA’s Core Competencies of Librarianship place the foundations of the profession first among all competency areas, requiring graduates to “employ the ethics, values, and foundational principles of the library profession” and to “promote democratic principles and intellectual freedom” (ALA, 2022). The ALA’s Core Values, updated in 2024, explicitly ground the entire accreditation framework for library and information science programs in commitments to access, equity, intellectual freedom, privacy, and the public good (ALA, 2024). Practitioners and scholars have long argued that the MLS provides the foundational knowledge and values necessary for socialization into the field and that degree completion unifies librarians with a common professional identity (Holley, 2016). Research on librarian professional identity supports this framing, finding that professional formation is understood as a process over time, defined in part by benchmark events and the internalization of professional norms and values, rather than a one-time credential transaction (Pierson et al., 2019). A subject PhD does not initiate that process. On-the-job experience may eventually transmit some of it. But that is a longer and less reliable path, and it places the burden of professional socialization entirely on individual institutions rather than on the shared educational infrastructure the profession has built.

One Size Does Not Fit All Institutions

Geffert’s argument treats R1 and R2 institutions as if they share a uniform personnel structure, but the reality is considerably more complex. Academic librarians are classified differently across institution types, some hold faculty status with full ranks, tenure, and governance rights equivalent to teaching faculty; others hold academic or professional staff status; still others occupy hybrid classifications unique to their institutions. This variation is not incidental. It is structural, and it has direct implications for how the MLS functions as a credential.

At institutions where librarians hold faculty status, the MLS is not simply a hiring preference. It is the terminal professional degree that anchors the faculty appointment itself. The ACRL Standards for Faculty Status for Academic Librarians state explicitly that “the MLS/MLIS degree is considered the terminal degree for this appointment.” The ACRL Standard for Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure is equally direct: “any librarian appointed to a college or university library faculty shall have the appropriate terminal professional degree.” Notably, even the ACRL Standards for Academic Librarians Without Faculty Status, written specifically for institutions where librarians do not hold faculty rank, still identifies the MLS from an ALA-accredited institution as the terminal degree for the profession. In other words, the professional standards framework treats the MLS as foundational across classification types, not just in faculty contexts.

The ramifications of devaluing or treating the MLS as optional are therefore not uniform across the profession, they are most acute precisely at the research-intensive institutions Geffert surveyed. At institutions where librarians hold faculty status, moving away from the MLS as the terminal degree credential does not simply expand a hiring pool. It raises fundamental questions about the basis for faculty appointment, the legitimacy of promotion and tenure review, parity with other faculty in governance and compensation, and the standing of librarians as full academic partners. These are not administrative details. They are the foundation of the professional standing that faculty librarians have built over decades. An argument for credential flexibility that does not account for these downstream consequences is not a complete argument, it is an administrator’s convenience framed as a professional reform.

Two Different Arguments

The claim that library schools are not producing graduates with sufficient skills in data science, GIS, digital scholarship, and other areas may well be true. This supports the conclusion that library schools need reform, not that the credential should be treated as optional. These are different arguments, and Geffert slides between them without acknowledging the distinction. The appropriate response to a medical school producing graduates with clinical gaps is to reform the curriculum, not to suggest that hospitals hire biology PhDs instead of MDs. Treating the MLS as optional undermines the case for investing in library education at exactly the moment that investment is most needed, and sends a signal to the market that the programs producing that credential are dispensable, even as we ask them to do better.

Economics and Politics

Geffert frames difficulty hiring candidates with skills in data science, GIS, and digital scholarship as evidence that the MLS pipeline is failing. There is a more direct explanation he does not consider: the compensation structures of academic libraries make these positions economically uncompetitive for the candidates he is hoping to attract, and the political environment in many states makes certain institutions genuinely difficult places to recruit to regardless of credential requirements.

On compensation, the numbers are telling. The median annual wage for academic librarians was $64,320 in May 2024, with early-career positions frequently starting between $50,000 and $65,000 (BLS, 2024). By contrast, the median annual wage for data scientists, one of the specific skill areas Geffert identifies as a gap, was $112,590 in May 2024, with projected job growth of 34 percent through 2034 (BLS, 2024). A candidate with a PhD in data science or geography who is weighing a position in an academic library against industry or government alternatives is not being deterred by credential requirements. They are being deterred by a salary structure that academic libraries largely cannot compete with. Opening the credential to subject PhD holders does not change that math at all.

The broader political environment compounds these economic pressures. Across a significant number of states, legislatures have targeted DEI offices, restricted curricula, and weakened faculty governance structures, creating conditions in which recruiting becomes genuinely difficult, independent of credential requirements (AAUP 2024a; AAUP 2024b). Professionals with the specialized skills Geffert identifies have substantial labor market mobility. A data scientist or digital scholar with options is unlikely to accept a below-market salary at an institution operating under political constraints that threaten academic freedom, regardless of whether the position requires an MLS or a subject PhD. The credential is not the barrier. The conditions of the work are.

This matters because Geffert’s argument implicitly assumes that relaxing the credential requirement creates a larger and more capable pool of willing applicants. If the economic and political conditions of academic library positions are what is actually limiting the pool, widening the credential gate does not address the underlying problem. It simply shifts who is excluded by those conditions from MLS graduates to subject PhD holders.

The Diversity Argument Collapses Under Scrutiny

Geffert argues that because the MLS pipeline is 87 percent white, opening hiring to subject PhD holders would help diversify the profession. The fields he identifies as sources of the skills libraries need are themselves deeply homogeneous. The NSF’s Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities 2023 report documents that underrepresented minorities (Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Alaska Native) collectively account for 37 percent of the U.S. college-age population but earned only 16 percent of science & engineering doctoral degrees in 2020, a gap that widens at every step up the degree ladder (NCSES, 2023). Women remain underrepresented at all degree levels in physical and earth sciences, mathematics and computer sciences, and engineering (NCSES, 2023). Black students earned only 5 percent of engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020 despite constituting 14 percent of the college-age population (NCSES, 2023). Geography, the home discipline for GIS, and one of the specific skill areas Geffert names as a gap, “is behind virtually all other fields of study examined across all degree types in terms of racial and ethnic representation,” with doctoral geography programs consistently trailing even other social sciences in diversity (AAG, 2023). Research on doctoral training across science and technology fields finds that Black men and women experience the greatest and most consistent loss of representation across the transition from bachelor’s to doctoral to postdoctoral stages (Hofstra et al., 2023). Swapping MLS pipelines for PhD pipelines in STEM, GIS, and related fields does not solve a diversity problem. It trades one homogeneous pipeline for another while abandoning the professional formation infrastructure the field has built.

The Unasked Question

There is a dimension this piece does not address at all, and it may be the most important one. Librarianship is approximately 82 percent female as of 2023 (BLS, 2024). Calls to bypass or devalue the credential of a female-dominated profession have a well-documented history that should give us pause. Sociological research by Levanon, England, and Allison found that as the proportion of women in an occupation grows, relative wages in that occupation decline — evidence of what researchers call occupational devaluation, the systematic undervaluing of work done by women (Levanon, England, and Allison, 2009). Seale and Mirza have argued directly in the library literature that academic librarianship’s turn toward non-MLS credentials is “inextricable from its search for markers of professionalization outside of librarianship, in the form of non-MLS degrees, more appealing domains of knowledge, and nonfeminized types of labor,” and that removing the MLS requirement “will not address these broader issues” (Seale and Mirza, 2020). Research published in College & Research Libraries has further shown that “the feminization of library work, and in particular the undervaluing of emotional labor required of public-facing roles like reference and instruction, serves as a way to continually devalue feminized work to uphold patriarchal norms” (Bryant, Bussell, and Halpern 2019).

We are watching the same dynamic play out in real time across other female-dominated professions. In 2025, the Department of Education reclassified nursing, social work, teaching, physical therapy, and audiology as non-professional degrees for student loan purposes — fields that are between 70 and 88 percent female (National Nurses United, 2026). As one university dean observed in response, “it is concerning that many of the professions in this category are women-dominated professions. This appears to be part of a larger attempt to undermine and minimize professional roles of women in our society” (University of Pittsburgh, 2025). The pattern of credential devaluation in female-dominated professions is not abstract. It is structural, it is historical, and it is happening now. An argument for treating the MLS as optional that does not engage with this pattern is an incomplete argument.

What the Profession Needs

None of this means the status quo is acceptable. Library schools must do more to develop graduates with the technical and interdisciplinary competencies the field needs. Institutions should invest in professional development that builds skills not fully addressed in graduate programs. The profession should have an honest and sustained conversation about where library education is falling short and demand better from its accredited programs, and work with them to make those changes. What the profession should not do is treat the credential as the source of its problems. The claim that library schools need to do better and the claim that the MLS itself is an obstacle are not the same claim. Conflating them, as Geffert does, redirects the profession away from the more important conversation about how to strengthen library education rather than abandon it.

To be clear, this is not an argument that subject PhD holders cannot succeed as academic librarians or that institutions should never consider candidates without an MLS. There are contexts where such hires make sense, and many non-MLS professionals have made genuine contributions to the field. The argument here is narrower and more specific: that Geffert has not made a sound case for systematically devaluing the MLS as a professional credential. His survey documents real hiring frustrations, but frustration is not analysis. The problems he identifies (skills gaps, diversity deficits, unfilled positions) have causes that his proposed solution does not address, and consequences for institutional classification, professional formation, and the gendered history of credential devaluation that his piece does not engage. A better argument for credential flexibility is possible, thoughGeffert has not made it. The MLS is not a barrier to a better profession. It is one of the foundations on which a better profession can be built, if we are willing to invest in it rather than look for a way around it.