October 1, 2025 | By Helen Wagner (A26)

In August 2023, St. John’s College announced a new addition to its undergraduate admissions process: the Discussion-Based Application, or DBA. Now entering its third year of use, the DBA serves as an alternative to the traditional written college application by providing prospective students with the opportunity to showcase their in-person conversation skills—an integral aspect of the school’s curriculum. This way, St. John’s can get to know future Johnnies and gauge their enthusiasm for the Program while, in turn, giving them a true taste of its signature experience. Plus, in today’s tech-saturated world, an initially unplanned but now-embraced secondary function of the DBA on St. John’s end is its ability to safeguard these evaluation cycles from the influence of artificial intelligence-influenced essays.

St. John’s has admitted two new undergraduate classes since the launch of the DBA. Many members of the Annapolis and Santa Fe Classes of 2028 and 2029 opted for it over the traditional written application— and then opted for four more years of conversation about the Great Books. “It took a lot of stress off of me during my senior year of high school,” says Claire Luzader, a first-year student in Santa Fe who hails from Phoenix, Arizona. “It was simple.”

The DBA has three main components: an interview with an admissions counselor, a separate interview with a tutor, and participation in a St. John’s seminar. The seminar requirement can either be fulfilled via a one-hour virtual seminar discussing preassigned readings with other prospective students or through participation in Summer Academy.

Luzader discovered the DBA while attending St. John’s Summer Academy, a pre-college residential experience for high school students during which they participate in seminars and tutorials, complete assignments, and enjoy activities typical of the college, such as croquet and swing dancing. At the Santa Fe campus’s “Love & Friendship”-themed session in 2023, where she read Jane Austen and Aristotle and explored the hiking trails behind campus, an admissions counselor informed Luzader that her application was already one-third complete thanks to her engagement in a daily seminar course.

With this prerequisite fulfilled, Luzader completed an in-person interview with an admissions counselor that same week. “We had an amazing conversation,” she says. “We talked for a while about plans and what I wanted out of the college, and I got to establish that connection there, so we could email back and forth, and she knew who I was. It was amazing because of that.”

When Luzader returned home, she had one final interview with a St. John’s tutor. She also submitted a short application form, her high school transcript, and graded academic writing samples. While writing aptitude carries less weight in the DBA than it does in a traditional essay-based college application, essay-writing does comprise a large portion of the St. John’s curriculum, making it necessary for future Johnnies to provide at least one prior example.

“I think that doing this discussion-based application through Summer Academy is really an amazing way to do it,” Luzader says. “My seminar was taken care of, and one of my interviews was in person. I really got to know people and live on campus for a whole week. So, I think those two things should just be entirely intertwined, because Summer Academy did a great job of introducing me to St John’s, and not only St John’s, but Santa Fe and its culture.”

Luzader heard back from St. John’s within a couple of months after submitting her completed application during the summer before senior year. The only other school she’d applied to was Arizona State, her state’s public university, using a traditional written application. But because she’d applied through St. John’s Early Decision, she knew right away that she’d opt to become a Johnnie if accepted—a genuine enthusiasm for the Program that had likely been made all the more palpable to both her and St. John’s College thanks to the DBA.

“I’ve fallen deeply in love with the Great Books,” Luzader says. “St John’s has a community of learning for the sake of knowledge and for virtue instead of learning as job preparation or looking good on a resume. And that’s really what I’m looking for at school: personal development; not just to find myself a good career in the end, even though that is also very possible with St John’s.”

Luzader is just one of 107 St. John’s applicants who applied to join the Class of 2029 via the DBA. Half of these applicants wound up enrolling, and they currently comprise 25 percent of the entering first-year class across both campuses.

“While the Discussion-Based Application may not suit every student, it offers an unparalleled opportunity for those who thrive in conversational contexts to authentically showcase their thinking,” says Ben Baum, Vice President of Enrollment. “In that respect, I think this new application will serve as a tool to promote access among students of diverse backgrounds and learning styles. Instead of simply submitting their application over a computer screen, students will engage deeply with St. John’s through the application process itself, allowing them to get to know the college better.”

Etienne Kueppenbender is an Annapolis first-year student from Belmont, Massachusetts. He heard about St. John’s through some alumni friends of his parents and attended Summer Academy after his sophomore year of high school. At the camp’s “Order & Disorder”-themed session in Annapolis in 2023, its conversation-based classes answered some of the questions Kueppenbender had about the learning style at St. John’s.

“I was a little skeptical about discussion-based everything—even math and stuff. I was like, how is this gonna work?” he says. “I wanted to figure out: Is this a scheme I could fit into? And by the end of [Summer Academy], I remember feeling, yes, this could definitely work.”

Kueppenbender didn’t apply anywhere else; the St. John’s application process was so efficient that he learned he’d been accepted within the first month of his senior year. But St. John’s also stood out to him not just for its unique admissions process or exceptional class structure but its close-knit community. Kueppenbender could tell that the kind of people applying to St. John’s were the kind of people he’d want to be in class with the following fall.

“If this Program is so unique,” he reflects, “then it’s going to be very self-selecting. Only the people who want to be here are going to be here, you know?” The discussion-based application caters to this self-selectiveness, making St. John’s stand out to prospective Johnnies from the very beginning of the admissions process.

St. John’s does, of course, also provide a standard essay-based application for prospective students, in which applicants expound on a “great book” that’s changed their life. Some might consider the DBA, in comparison, to be more time-efficient, but that doesn’t make it any less rigorous. The DBA presents a different kind of challenge, one that can’t be improved through a college counselor’s suggested edits or by using spell-checking software—or, for that matter, any form of generative AI.

“Having a conversation like that can be intimidating,” Kueppenbender says, as prospective students who do the DBA must demonstrate through a seminar that they possess the potential to sustain a peer-to-peer dialogue that could, at any moment, venture into abstract or esoteric territory. A St. John’s education, after all, is all about teaching students to rise to the challenge.

St. John’s undergraduates in Annapolis and Santa Fe read Plato’s Phaedrus twice throughout their four-year seminar program: once in their first year, and again in their senior year. In this dialogue, Socrates describes the importance of spoken words in contrast with written ones: Speech, he says, is “written with intelligence in the mind of the learner, which is able to defend itself and knows to whom it should speak, and before whom to be silent.” And, at the end of the day, the St. John’s Program is inextricably linked with living conversation: it is present in every class, from seminars to tutorials. The DBA reflects this, giving future Johnnies the chance to join the conversation before they’ve even enrolled.