St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland was chartered in 1784 upon a most liberal plan for the benefit of youth of every religious denomination. In 1937 the New Program, under which the college still operates, was instituted. Under it, we help our students learn to ask fundamental questions and practice thoughtfulness in public. We introduce them to the textual tradition of reason that illuminates such central features of modern life as democracy and technology, as well as to the literary and musical tradition of the West. We are committed to the use of a list of great books that is both fairly stable and under continual review. These are books agreed to be excellent, to form a coherent sequence, and to raise most cogently questions we want our students to consider. We foster literacy in three kinds of texts: verbal, mathematical, and musical. We want our students to develop the intellectual virtues of courage in inquiry, caution in forming opinions, candor about their ignorance, open attentiveness to the words of their colleagues, industry in preparation, and meticulousness in verbal translations as well as in mathematical demonstrations. We give our students the experience of living in a community of learning imbued with attitudes of consideration and respect that foster moral virtues appropriate to their future lives as citizens. We think that the college has a wider mission in contributing to the invigoration of American education by giving help to other institutions that ask for it, by encouraging our students to become teachers, and by providing to a wide constituency occasions for actual learning in the spirit and through the materials of our program.
< CollapseSt. John's College is a liberal arts college with two U.S. campuses: Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 1696 as a preparatory school, King William's School, the institution received a collegiate charter in 1784. St. John's is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the U.S. Since 1937, it has followed an unusual curriculum, the Great Books Program, based on discussion of works from the Western philosophic and literary canon. The College is renowned for its intellectual atmosphere.
Despite its name, St. John's College has no religious affiliation. The school grants only one bachelor's degree. Two master's degrees are currently available, one in Liberal Arts, which is a modified version of the undergraduate curriculum, and a parallel course of studies in Eastern Classics. Both graduate degrees are awarded to graduate students through the college's Graduate Institute.
The Great Books program (often called simply "the Program" or "the New Program" at St. John's) was developed at the University of Chicago by Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler in the mid-1930s as an alternative form of education to the then rapidly changing undergraduate curriculum. St. John's adopted the Great Books program in 1937, when the college was facing the possibility of financial and academic ruin. The Great Books program in use today was heavily influenced by Jacob Klein, who was Dean of the college in the 1940s and 1950s.
The four-year program of study, nearly all of which is mandatory, demands that students read and discuss the works of many of Western civilization's most prominent contributors to philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, music, poetry, and literature, such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Einstein. In line with the views of the program's founders—who complained of "vocational interests" that "clutter" other college's curricula—"Johnnies", as St. John's students style themselves, usually value intellectual pursuits for their own sake, regardless of whether they have practical application. Tutorials (mathematics, language, and music), as well as Seminar and Laboratory, are discussion-based. In the Mathematics tutorial students often demonstrate propositions that mathematicians throughout various ages have laid out. In the Language tutorial student translations are presented (Ancient Greek is studied in the first two years and French for the last two). The tutorials, with Seminar and Laboratory, constitute the "classes". All classes, and in particular the Seminar, are considered formal exercises; consequently, students address one another, as well as their teachers, only by their last names during class.
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| Percent of Students International: | 0% |
| On-Campus Housing Available: | Yes |
| Percent of Students Living On-Campus: | 63% |
| Freshman Students Required to Live on Campus: | Yes |
| Tuition & Fees (undergraduate) | Expenses | ||
Published Tuition and Fees: |
$ 32,575 | ||
Average Tuition for Full-Time Undergrads: |
$ 32,374 | ||
Required Fees for Full-Time Undergrads: |
$ 200 | ||
| Financial Aid | Avg. Amount Received | % of Students Receiving Aid | |
Federal Grants: |
$ 3,703 | 13% | |
State and Local Grants: |
$ 3,900 | 9% | |
Institutional Grants: |
$ 13,708 | 44% | |
Student Loans: |
$ 4,025 | 54% | |
Any Aid: |
59% |
| Acceptance Rate: | 76% (Selective) |
| Test Scores | |
| SAT Scores: | |
| % of Students Submitting SAT Scores: | 89% |
| Bottom 25th Percentile: | Verbal: 660, Math: 590 |
| Top 75th Percentile: | Verbal: 760, Math: 680 |
| Formal Demonstration of Competencies: | Not Required |
| High School Diploma or Equivalent: | Recommended |
| High School GPA: | Not Required |
| High School Rank: | Recommended |
| High School Record: | Required |
| Recommendations: | Required |
| TOEFL: | Required |
| Test Scores: | Recommended |
