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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]they need some AI division of Google or something to come in and say they want these grads.

the two issues with St Johns is super high transfer rate (and the credits don't transfer) and very low starting salary rate. Lower than humanities majors at bigger universities.

I blame those two things on the school. You have to communicate what the program is (so you dont lose kids) and then communicate who the grads are to HR departments. That's two hires St Johns should make - one person to take charge of each of these issues[/quote]

The starting salary problem is I think bigger than a marketing issue. It's a skill problem. Johnnies learn one skill and one skill very well - close reading of texts translated into English. What math and science they take is hamstrung by the Great Books approach - they actually learn classical geometry from reading Euclid, analytic geometry from reading Descartes, and relativity from reading Einstein. That's a problem because most of the important discoveries in math and science are fairly recent (19th century or later) and being updated all the time.

Even setting that aside (many successful liberal arts majors have a weaker math and science background) there are other problems with teaching harder skills. I have already written above that I don't think much of Johnnies' foreign language preparation. But even more importantly for employability with a LA degree, they do all close reading and very little research with secondary sources. That's a problem for research heavy fields that hire LA majors, like consulting and marketing.

Johnnies do make great journalists, ad writers, etc., however. I know one who's a self taught Linux administrator.[/quote]
That's one part of their curriculum I never understood: Math and Science. Unlike Literature and the Classics, natural sciences don't run off the "greats" to understand them; in fact, many are impossible to begin without passing the knowledge of many non-greats. You cannot start Gabriele Veneziano "String Theory" without a lot of physics instruction. Same with math and chemistry and biology. Even understanding Einstein's theory of relativity is strung across multiple physics courses from undergrad to grad. They could easily update the math curriculum as all it involves is chalk and a professor (or just leave the kids copies of Topology and Real Analysis if needed), but the sciences require a ton of investment if they actually want to teach a great science curriculum.[/quote]

[b]FWIW, the school is on the list of top feeder schools for math and physics Ph.D.s[/b]. So grad schools apparently think the education accomplishes something valuable.

I don’t know much about the program — but I can imagine that tracing the history of human thought on math, astronomy, motion, relativity, etc, could be a pretty exciting foundation for more contemporary challenges. [/quote]

I wonder how this works. It [i]is[/i] ranked #15 (adjusted) among math and statistics PhD program feeders: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs#math (that's below Reed and St. Olaf, but still impressive). And yet they go in with no modern algebra, topology, etc.? Seems odd.

FWIW 10 percent of the graduating class goes into STEM, which seems to be construed rather broadly - it would seem to include the self taught Linux admin I knew: https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/2316/0268/1564/Alumni_Success_Career_Paths_Data_Graph_2020.jpg

The largest group goes into education and library science.[/quote]

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