免費的常春藤 無需學位也可大獲成功

If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy League university unenrolled and undetected, says Guillaume Dumas, a 28-year-old Canadian, start with big lecture courses. If you must sit in on a smaller seminar class, it’s important to show up consistently starting with the first session, instead of halfway through the semester. Also, one of the best alibis is that you’re enrolled as a liberal-arts student. “That`s the kind of program that`s filled with everything and that you expect people to be a bit weird, a bit confused about what they do,” he says.

如果你想要混進常春藤大學裏蹭課而不被發現，那麼就從人多的大課開始——這正是今年28歲的加拿大“蹭課大神”紀堯姆•杜馬斯的建議。如果你一定要蹭人少的課，那麼最好第一節課就出現在教室，並且保持高出勤率。還有，最好的掩護就是說自己是“人文學院的學生”，因爲“這些學院的項目總是囊括所有，讓人們不知道學生們都在學些什麼。”

From 2008 to 2012, Dumas claims he did stints on a number of elite North American universities—Yale, Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and McGill, to name a few—sitting in on classes, attending parties, and living near campus as if he were an enrolled student. This deception may sound like a lead-up to a true-crime story, but Dumas’s exploits appear to be harmless, done in a spirit of curiosity. "A lot of students are bored in class," he observes, "so if you participate, if you ask questions, if you are genuinely interested in the class, I think the teacher will like you."

杜馬斯稱自己在2008年至2012年間曾出入北美諸多一流高校，如耶魯、布朗、加州大學伯克利分校、斯坦福、麥吉爾大學等等；他像這些學校的正式註冊生一樣住在學校附近、去上課，參加派對。這樣的“行騙”過程，聽來馬上就要演變成一個真實的犯罪故事。但是杜馬斯似乎並無惡意，只是出於好奇。他發現，“大部分學生都對課程興味索然，所以只要你積極參與、提問、表現出對課程的興趣，老師就會對你青睞有加。”

More importantly, the concept of his story wasn`t implausible either: As tuition costs have skyrocketed, it makes sense that people might try to siphon off some of the benefits of college without paying. While the specifics of what Dumas told me may be hard to confirm, the fact remains that a young adult could conceivably infiltrate a college campus without paying tuition. What might this say about the monetary value of a diploma? And can its component parts—learning, socializing, networking—be unbundled? If so, what would remain?

杜馬斯的故事並非天方夜譚，因爲（英美國）大學學費高昂，人們想要免費享受些高校資源的心理不難理解。雖然杜馬斯故事的細節有待考證，但是一個年輕人能夠不付學費就混進大學已是事實。通過這個故事，我們是否看到了文憑本身金錢價值？學校課程、高校社交與人脈網的打造又是否可獨立存在？如果是這樣，那麼花錢上大學還剩下了什麼？

Representatives from some of the schools Dumas attended said that his story is quite rare, though not unheard of. A spokesperson from Stanford said that a student would be asked to leave campus if he or she was attending class without authorization, but added, “Stanford has a relatively small student body and a close-knit student community. It would be challenging for someone to go unnoticed.” Yale’s spokesperson said that someone like Dumas would be trespassing, and noted that he could instead take some of the free courses Yale offers online.

杜馬斯曾經蹭過課的一些學校代表稱，雖然他們並非第一次聽說這種情況，但杜馬斯確實只是個例。斯坦福的發言人曾表示，在斯坦福，如果有學生未經允許進教室蹭課，那麼他/她將被驅逐出校園，但其同時也表示“斯坦福的學生較少，學生間的來往更爲密切，因此想要混入學校、不被發現並非易事”。耶魯大學的發言人則認爲杜馬斯這樣的行爲屬於非法進入，建議其他像杜馬斯一樣的人可以在線上耶魯的免費課程。

But according to Dumas, one of the best perks of college that’s available for free is the networking. “I think more than anything it’s meeting people. It`s contacts. It`s social capital. The kind of people I met in Berkeley or in Yale, I don`t know anywhere else in the world with so many smart, cool, open-minded, crazy people can be concentrated,” he says. “And when you think of all the dropouts right now that start companies and stuff, it`s all people that didn`t need a diploma, that didn`t need to pay anything. They went to school to open their minds and meet friends, or meet strategy partners, or something like that.”

但是，對於杜馬斯而言，上大學最大的好處之一就是免費建立的人脈關係。他說，“我覺得在那裏最重要的就是結交朋友、建立人脈關係、利用好社交資源。比如在伯克利或是耶魯，那裏聚集着很多聰慧、新潮、思想開放、甚至瘋狂的人。而你再想想那些從中途退學創業的人，他們都是對文憑毫無興趣，也無需爲上大學買單；他們上學不過是爲了開拓思維、廣交朋友、邂逅合夥人。

From this vantage point, a diploma starts to look a lot like a receipt printed on fine cardstock. It is proof not that one has learned something in college, but that one has paid for it. Without a diploma, how can Dumas prove to anyone—a potential employer—that he’s undergone an intellectually stimulating experience?

從這一點來看，文憑不過是一張製作精良的收據。它並不能說明你在學校學到了什麼，只代表你交過學費。但如果沒有文憑，杜馬斯又要如何向他未來的老闆或是其他人證明，自己曾經接受過這樣“挑戰智商”的教育呢？

But these days, you don’t need a degree to become wildly successful, as Mark Zuckerberg and countless other young entrepreneurs have demonstrated. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and MIT found that what matters more than anything else in a job application is whether the candidate knows someone at the company.

當今，無需學位也可大獲成功。Facebook創始人馬克•扎克伯格，以及無數創業成功的年輕人都證明了這一點。紐約聯邦儲備銀行與麻省理工學院的研究人員發現，求職者是否在公司內部有人脈纔是求職申請能否通過的關鍵。

Dumas admits that his approach wouldn`t work if everyone did it. But he does believe that it could work for some people (just not those who need their degrees to function as technical certifications or licenses, like engineers or doctors). “There might be a better interest in not paying tuition and keeping that money to travel the world and launch a business than having your diploma in philosophy from, I don`t know, Johns Hopkins,” Dumas says.

當然，杜馬斯也承認，如果大家都像他這麼做，也許這個方法就不會奏效了。但是它確實適用於某些人（除了一些學位即專業性證書的領域，比如工程師或是醫生）。杜馬斯說，“他們可以省下學費，用這些錢去環遊世界或是創業，而不是在約翰霍普金斯大學裏拿一個哲學文憑。”