When high school students start their college scouting, they usually aren’t thinking five or six years down the road. Parents might ask about job placement rates or career services, but these resources aren’t usually a priority for prospective students. And unlike some other schools, Columbia makes little mention of alumni success rates when promoting itself, except for mentioning big names.

As the years go by and the real world becomes more of a reality, students have to start preparing for internships and interviews. Columbia has an impressive number of collaborative services to help, such as internship coordinators, the Portfolio Center, ColumbiaWorks, Industry Night and job fairs.

What Columbia doesn’t publicize, however, are hard facts about its graduates. Many schools keep track of where alumni are employed and make that information readily available. Columbia shares success stories in the Featured Alumni section of the website and in Demo magazine, but does not present data on graduates.

If students didn’t consider the job market before attending Columbia, they now recognize jobs in fine arts and media fields have never been as abundant as jobs in other industries. Now more than ever, they are tough markets to enter. Understandably, employment information on graduates might not make the best impression on prospective students and their families. But interested parties should be responsible enough to view the data with a critical eye and consider the economy graduates face.

Without tracking the success of its graduates, how can Columbia accurately measure the success of services for students preparing to graduate and ultimately, the success of the institution?

Students in some departments sing high praises of their internship coordinators, while others say their coordinator is difficult to reach or offers little guidance. Many seniors were thankful for the Portfolio Center but had lackluster reviews of Industry Night, Columbia’s premier networking event.

More measures should be put in place to rate the usefulness of these pre-graduate programs. Without following the achievements of all alumni, Columbia cannot continually strive for improvements to best prepare its graduating seniors for the industries they want to enter.