OK, full disclosure, I'm a Johnnie.
I've visited over !00 colleges over the last three years in my job an independent college counselor, and I've seen some wonderful schools. With the possible exceptions of Hampshire, Evergreen State, New College (Florida) Deep Springs, Marlboro, and Shimer there is simply no place in America that offers so radically wonderful an education dedicated to the life of the mind as St John's. (I'm excluding schools such as Reed and Whitman and Pomona and Grinnell as wonderful but regular liberal arts colleges.) These schools, each in its own distinctive way, are St John's equals. It has no superior. It is a intellectual's dream come true. Loren Pope is right.
I started in the Graduate Institute and stayed for the undergraduate, dropping my acceptance to work on a Ph.D. in Elizabethan Studies at University of Washington in order to stay at St John's to get a second BA. Yes, it's that special. I had found my self sitting on the edge of my bed crying at the thought I was going to have to leave this place where I had found what I had always thought a college education would be to pursue my doctorate. So I didn't . And no, I am not easily given to tears.
If you love to read, if you want to figure out the symbiotic intersections of geometry, philosophy, music, physics, politics, rhetoric, literature, religion and astronomy (among other disciplines) in small group discussions with only full professors and 'the big books' of the Western cannon (no text books) then this is the place for you. And it is unique. No other school, none, trusts its students to play with the big boys, and demands that they do, as St John's does. Period. End of story. But you'd better love to read... alot.