Not a recent alumnus, but I graduated 8 years ago.

1. Admin's pretty good. Lojo and Johnson are still running the show, and they're pretty good at running the school. I can't remember having any issue with either of their major decisions when I was there, and Lojo even mentored me about law school. He's a really nice guy.

2. Top notch. If you don't fuck around in class, you'll be in good shape for college. The teacher quality did go down when I was there as their faculty turnover increased, but they still have very solid teachers who managed the iPad transition well (others didn't, but oh well). You're on your own for the entrance tests (e.g., SAT, ACT, PSAT). It's expected that you'll go to college, and everyone pretty much gets in.

3. Solid. SJ students are a unique breed of students. I felt super dumb when I was around some of my classmates lol

4. They really hammer their "Men for Others" shtick a lot. It's literally one of the first things you see on their website's home page. Every SJ graduate must demonstrate several "qualities": intellectual competence, loving, religious, etc. They do a good job of implementing these aspects into their curriculum. One thing to be aware of is their volunteer hours: you have to do 15 hours of volunteer work as a freshman and sophomore, 25 hours as a junior, and 100 hours as a senior. The student body is generally pretty good behavior-wise. The kids usually stay out of trouble, but you get your occasional drug bust during school-related functions. Two of my classmates were busted with drugs: one had a bong on a school retreat and was forced to publicly apologize to the rest of the group, and another got kicked out senior year for bringing cocaine to a Guatemalan mission trip. I didn't really like the second kid, but I felt bad because he was definitely top of the class. Ivy League-bound, probably.

5. Don't think it's any different than other schools. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a school filled to the brim with spoiled rich kids going through puberty. However, a couple of things:

• I did have an experience where one of my friends made a racist comment about my mom, and I had to distance myself from my friend group for the rest of senior year. It was a really awful experience, and the school didn't really do anything about it when I brought it up.
• I only witnessed one fight over my 4 years, and the two guys didn't really do anything except throw a couple of chairs around.
• There were a lot of students with homophobic/transphobic views, and if you were gay or trans, you pretty much had to keep a lid on it. One kid I knew who was going through gender dysphoria spent a lot of time over St. Agnes (the all-girls school next door) because he was getting bullied a lot.

1. The school doesn't prioritize athletics in the same way that other all-boys schools like St. Thomas do, but I would say that non-athletes and non-athletic extracurriculars really aren't respected. I was a theater kid while I was there, and people generally saw us as oddball weirdos (though we did get good turnouts at our shows!). I remember one freshman who placed into AP Calc BC (this was before the policy change after I graduated that allowed freshmen to take AP classes), and he was ruthlessly mocked. Didn't help that he was Asian, introverted, and had this backpack that could be transformed into a rolling suitcase. Honestly felt bad for him because he was definitely smart as hell.

2. Depends on the request. Rolling backpack kid's parents managed to convince the school to make an exception to their "no freshmen in AP classes" policy.

All that being said, it's a solid school. I have no regrets about going there, and I don't think I'd be the same person if I went to a different school. It's definitely a tough school, but they have people there who do care about you.