I think your problem is more likely to be with class loaders than class paths. Clojure probably has to set up its own, to allow all the monkey patching it does,

I think your problem is more likely to be with class loaders than class paths. Clojure probably has to set up its own, to allow all the monkey patching it does, including dynamically setting the classpath. If JDBC was loaded already, it will be able to see Clojure objects passed as parameters, but not able to find the class by reflection on its name.