Liberal Arts vs. Ivy League

<p>I don’t intend any disrespect to warblersrule, but I just wanted to offer another perspective on St. John’s College, having graduated from the school last year.</p>

<p>To Jenn98765, I’d just like to say that if your goal is to attend a college where you will feel completely integrated into a community of learning, SJC is an excellent pick. Other liberal arts colleges will provide you with an opportunity to meet with your professors. At SJC, the tutors (our version of professors-- they don’t claim to “profess,” only to participate in the conversation) will start to feel like family, if you want them to. The college is very small, and you will know and be known by almost everyone by the time you graduate. This obviously isn’t for everybody, but if your goal is to make connections that will last you a lifetime, SJC is a good place. All of the tutorials and seminars at the college have 15-20 students. You will never sit through a lecture course at this school: all classes are discussion based, and students and tutors participate as equals in an effort to understand the texts that comprise what we call the “Program.”</p>

<p>I’d also like to contest the “jack of all trades, master of none” criticism. The careers into which our graduates emerge are as varied as the personalities that can be found on the campus. We are teachers, lawyers, astrophysicists, engineers, movie producers, singers, doctors, and an innumerable amount of other things. I interned at the United States Naval Observatory through a fellowship with the college, where both my boss and my boss’s boss were St. John’s graduates working in astrometry. The criticism that the curriculum is light on math and science doesn’t hold up well when you consider the fields in which our graduates work.</p>

<p>St. John’s is also an excellent place to get an undergraduate degree if you have your eye set on elite graduate programs. I’m studying education at Columbia right now, and my interest in education was stirred because of how much I came to believe in the St. John’s program during the course of my undergraduate years there.</p>

<p>I forgot to mention one thing. With the unique Great Books curriculum, St. John’s understands the need to help its students who will need additional kinds of requisite coursework for graduate studies or career education in a variety of fields, and it has programs in place to help you make transitions into either graduate schools or other areas of work.</p>