Is Harvard worth it?
Interesting question, and research provides an interesting answer. However, in thinking about my own undergraduate education, I do think the St. John’s program was different, at least in those days. (I’ve not been to the college for many years.) The St. John’s program was skills-oriented rather than content-oriented, and the entire program was structured to exercise the targeted skills—the liberal arts—more or less constantly, beginning with having a single four-year program of study so that students end up talking mainly about their studies because it’s the one thing they all have in common: everyone there is studying, has studied, or will study whatever you are studying at the time. So that’s what is discussed, and that on-going discussion, rooted in difficult texts, exercises many of the skills imparted (reading, listening, reasoning, explaining, and so on).
