Why St. John’s

St. John’s College is a community of 1,000 students engaged in a rigorous exploration of great books and big ideas. We share a common curriculum centered on reading and discussing some of the most important thinkers over the last 3,000 years, including Plato, Shakespeare, Euclid, Nietzsche, Einstein, Austen, and Du Bois—to name just a few. Every class is a small, interdisciplinary discussion about the books led by the best teaching faculty in the world. Students take classes in philosophy, Ancient Greek and Roman classics, literature, politics and political theory, history and law, biology, physics and astronomy, mathematics including Euclidean geometry and calculus, music theory, psychology, modern poetry, and more, drawing connections between disciplines and graduating with a single interdisciplinary major in the liberal arts. With a 7:1 student-to-faculty ratio, the college regularly ranks among the best for undergraduate teaching and most accessible faculty, and this is part of the reason St. John’s was named one of the forty-four “Colleges That Change Lives.”

This is an experience open to all: with generous merit scholarships and need-based financial aid, St. John’s is one of the most affordable colleges in the country for diverse students of all backgrounds who love reading and discussing the greatest ideas in history.