The Masters of Archival Studies and American Education Standards: An Argument for the Continued Development of Graduate Archival Education in the United States

The purpose of this paper is to report on the recent work of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Committee on Education and Professional Development (CEPD) in preparing new education guidelines calling for a Master of Archival Studies degree; these new guidelines, if accepted by the SAA membership and approved by Council, will replace the long-accepted three-course sequence first stated in the 1977 graduate education guidelines and reaffirmed in 1988. The comments in this essay fall into three categories: first, what CEPD has done and why it has worked in the way it has; secondly, my own experience on CEPD in the mid-1980s and as chair of the CEPD subcommittee that drafted what eventually became the 1988 SAA graduate archival education guidelines; and, thirdly, increasing evidence for the necessity and viability of the MAS-type graduate program