most rigorous colleges in the U.S.

Pleased to see the Daily Beast, HERE, rank St. John’s in Santa Fe the #1 most rigorous and St. John’s Annapolis #8. (I did my freshman year at the Santa Fe campus and last three years in Annapolis.)

Not sure why the difference between the two campuses, whether it’s arbitrary, based on numbers, or reflects an actual change in the two campus cultures. In my student days, the general reputation was that Annapolis was academically tougher than Santa Fe. However, Annapolis did have shorter classes, though I’m not sure if that’s still the case. It was an hour and ten minutes for tutorials in Annapolis and an hour and a half in Santa Fe.

In any case, that was one major life decision that I’m confident I completely nailed. There is no better undergraduate education in the world, at least not if the humanities is your thing. (The history of mathematics and science is fantastic there too, but might not be what you need if you want to hit the ground running at 22 as a practicing physicist or engineer.) But if you want to be a philosopher, anthropologist, lawyer, or other such fields, you can’t do better anywhere in the world.

The most important skill the college teaches is a certain fearlessness in the face of any book. Once you’ve read Ptolemy, Maxwell, Hegel, and Leibniz’s calculus papers without professorial assistance, no one’s ever going to be able to bullshit you again.