Thanks, @london203 . Indeed, the thread is quickly being derailed by things that aren’t relevant to the topic.
@Lindagaf I apologize for any part I had in that! That part of my comment was an aside, and not at all the main thing I was trying to convey. I was pleased to see a discussion on an all-too-infrequently mentioned school. I hope the thread can get back to your original intent.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please stay on topic.
Not everyone has the option to do Directed Studies at Yale or the Humanities Core at Stanford, or to take Columbia’s or Chicago’s Core Curriculum. And none of those is actually remotely like the fully committed Great Books approach at St. John’s. Relative to most general education requirements, they are somewhat like St. John’s. But one way or another they all deny their Great Bookism, and none of them makes the kind of time commitment or breadth commitment St. John’s does, not to mention St. John’s rigid chronology.
St. John’s is not what I would choose for an educational core, but it’s a perfectly valid, challenging, even inspiring option. I’m glad it exists and that students who want it can have it. Students should probably expect to do some post-baccalaureate work to qualify for specific jobs, but – guess what? – I think that applies to the vast majority of students from liberal arts universities and colleges, including all of those mentioned above. Only a tiny percentage of my college classmates does not have some graduate degree, and increasingly the same is true of my children’s college classmates.
Your sample is not representative of the general population.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/educational-attainment/2017/cps-detailed-tables/table-2-1.xlsx says that in 2017, there were 46,262,000 people age 25 and over with bachelor’s degrees, versus 20,592,000 with master’s degrees, 3,172,000 with professional degrees, and 4,077,000 with doctoral degrees (27,841,000 with degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree). So most people with bachelor’s degrees do not go on to earn a graduate or professional degree afterward.
The cost of education beyond a bachelor’s degree (outside of funded PhD programs) may be a significant barrier to many who may want to continue.
The Land Grant colleges offer something terrific for certain students. The LAC’s offer something terrific for certain students. The Service Academies; Berea; the music conservatories. A college does not need to offer all things to all people. I think it’s what makes our system of higher ed so robust- the student who wants to study at Julliard would likely be a poor fit at the Coat Guard Academy, and the student at Marlboro might be a poor fit at U Alabama. That’s not a knock on Alabama.
Why does every single college in America have to offer accounting, engineering, nursing or the appropriate pre-med pathway in order to be relevant?
St Johns – like MIT, or Chicago or Julliard – offers a specific kind of education for a specific kind of student. It also offers a stunning setting. Few places in this country offer the views, the unique culture, landscape and cuisine you’d find in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the right person, this could be Nirvana !
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Another moderator asked, on this very page, to keep the discussion on-topic. Even though she said “please,” it was not a request. So what engineering schools/programs should do has nothing to do with this thread. Several more posts after her note have been deleted
^I’m glad Google doesn’t feel as you do. My DD is a software engineer there with an astrophysics degree.
@ucbalumnus I thought I was talking about a demographic slice of the population that was a lot narrower than “everybody” when I was talking about people who might be attracted to St. John’s or Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, or even Texas Plan II. My personal/family experience is with the sort of elite institutions that people seem to assume guarantee great jobs, and I repeat that graduate or professional degrees are nearly universal. I struggle to think of a couple people who never got one, besides those with family businesses to inherit. (And, by the way, I know more people who inherited family businesses and got graduate degrees than not.)
But your figures would tell me that almost 29 million out of 46 million four-year college graduates have graduate degrees (assuming that incidental masters degrees of PhD recipients aren’t being counted). That’s perilously close to two-thirds, and counts as “most” in anyone’s book. It also matters that the age range starts at 25, and goes on forever, because lots of graduate degrees are earned by people older than 25, and I do not believe graduate degrees were nearly as prevalent with pre-boomers, people now older than 71 or 72. Also, those bachelors numbers include specialized degrees (BSE, BSN, etc.) for which no graduate degree is necessary. So I think those numbers undercount the prevalence of graduate degrees for people with general liberal arts bachelors degrees in mid-career now, and probably in the future, too.
That’s not to discount the issue of the cost of graduate degrees being a barrier for many people, but St. John’s lowering its tuition significantly is an important way to address that. At sticker price, St. John’s plus a post-bac pre-med program would still be an enormous bargain compared to a bachelor’s degree with pre-med requirements completed from any remotely comparable liberal arts university or college.
FWIW - The Census data are for highest education level attained. So the population with graduate degrees are in addition to those with a bachelor’s degree. The percentage of those with a graduate degree out of those with a bachelors or higher is 36%, not two-thirds.
Back to the topic at hand, St. John’s has a clear educational mission and academic framework. They pull in a small subset of students around the 90th percentile, rather than the 99th. Is it possible to have a strong foundation in the humanities without learning rudimentary ancient Greek? Columbia and Chicago would certainly say yes. Brown would probably disagree about the need to require all college students to take the same classes like high school. Most academic faculty would probably also say it is a disservice to students to have almost no women or people of color in their canon. But, given a choice between academically dubious vocational majors and a St. John’s curriculum, the choice is pretty easy.