And the students, it would appear, are beginning to catch on. The evaluations filled out by the journalism students before last year’s graduation underscore the problem. Of course, there were a number of satisfied customers—“Excellent! I want to be an active alumnus”—as you would expect from an institution that bestows an award, prize or fellowship upon one in eight of its graduates. And a pair of untenured professors seem to touch their students profoundly: Samuel Freedman, who teaches a course in book writing, and Richard Blood, who teaches basic reporting but puts his fifteen students through a life-changingly rigorous program more like boot camp. (He also happens to believe that the school lacks any real standards: “There aren’t three or four of my colleagues who have any business being here,” he told me. “I’ll be kind. I’ll say half a dozen.”)

But many more of the students seem to have peered into their futures with dismay. Here’s a small sample of the evaluations: “I am totally disappointed with the whole program.” “I can’t believe I paid this much money [tuition at the Columbia program is $18,000] to come here and I can’t get help finding a job.” “The placement office was something of a joke, as there were only two or three recruiters who came, most from very specialized journalism (i.e., Baseball Weekly).” “The J-school is a farce. The emperor has no clothes.” “I find it outrageous that the placement director left in October and students were never formally notified a) that she was gone or b) about progress in the search for a replacement. We are adults who are paying your salaries ...” And so on.

In the absence of optimistic placement statistics the authorities at Columbia offer a more elaborate explanation of the benefits of their journalism degree: it may not help you right away, but it will help you down the road. “I spent a lot of the time telling people that no, no one is going to make you a foreign correspondent and send you abroad next year,” says Judith Serrin, the placement director who left Columbia a year and a half ago. “What I used to say is that people who are out five years make these jumps.” The school seems to have settled on this story. Seven students and two professors cited the figure for me, unsolicited. Five years. Big jump. The belief in mysterious yet imminent career jumps has the advantage of being impossible to disprove without the benefit of a team of researchers. Enough able, driven people pass through Columbia and proceed to greater glory to sustain the myth. The question, impossible to answer, is whether they would have made the big jump on their own anyway

Explanations for the big jump vary, but the consensus among the students is that it happens because of personal connections. “The majority of the people who come out of here and get jobs move up the ladder very quickly because of the network,” says a student named Ron Spingarn. “They know the right people.” Says another student: “They say the connections you make here are worth the money.” Pressed on how this happens, she says, “There is an amazing Ivy League door-opening thing that goes on when you mention Columbia.” One of her classmates, a scholarship student, adds, “It’s not what your grades are. It’s who do you know. What professors do you know?” The frenzy of student networking is apparent, especially to the faculty. “When I went up there to teach,” says a reporter for The New York Times, “it was clear to me that the main reason [people attended] was that the students wanted to meet someone who worked at The New York Times.”