“Working as an assistant for six years is not unheard of,” Mr. Dahm said. He estimated that perhaps a quarter of the two dozen graduates in his class had lined up assistant jobs; about as many, like himself, are still looking for similar work, he said, while the rest are writing screenplays or otherwise preparing projects that might open a path into the business.

At U.S.C. about 4,800 would-be students applied for fewer than 300 slots next fall, up from about 2,800 applicants the year before. Educators at established film and television programs like those at New York University, the University of Texas, Loyola Marymount University and the University of California, Los Angeles, said they had seen a similarly sharp step-up in the number of students seeking what used to be called film education but now typically embraces the production of video games and Webisodes and virtually any medium in which the pictures move.

By and large those established programs have kept enrollments steady. But an expanding number of new film and media programs at other colleges around the country helped feed what appears to be a bumper crop of graduates in the academic year that just ended.

Several deans and other administrators said they were not aware of precise statistics documenting growth across the field. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said 136 institutions in the United States submitted entries for its Student Academy Awards program this year, up by a third from 102 in 2009.

“I’ve never seen a major start with so many students in it so quickly,” said David D. Lee, dean of the Potter College of Arts and Letters at Western Kentucky University, which last year added an undergraduate film and television production program. It now has 84 majors, many with only a vague notion of the future for which they are training. “I’m going to make a career that probably doesn’t even exist right now,” was Mr. Lee’s description of the prevailing ethic.