occupies a site on St Giles' and in 2024 had a student body of 419 undergraduates and 244 postgraduates. There are over 100 academic staff, and a like number of other staff. In 2018 St John's topped the Norrington Table, the annual ranking of Oxford colleges' final results, and in 2021, St John's ranked second with a score of 79.8.
== History ==
On 1 May 1555, Sir Thomas White, lately Lord Mayor of London, obtained a Royal Patent of Foundation to create a charitable institution for the education of students within the University of Oxford. White, a Roman Catholic, originally intended St John's to provide a source of educated Roman Catholic clerics to support the Counter-Reformation under Queen Mary, and indeed Edmund Campion, the Roman Catholic martyr, studied here.
White acquired buildings on the east side of St Giles', north of Balliol and Trinity Colleges, which had belonged to the former College of St Bernard, a monastery and house of study of the Cistercian order that had been founded in 1437 and closed …
