What is it like to Be Educated at an Ivy League School Without Paying Tuition

The number one, key fact is that the education is free.

At the best of the best schools, they open their campuses to the community. The schools I am specifically referring to are Stanford and MIT. I have experienced free access and experienced free educational content. I have seen a few programs made available via Harvard Law.

To expand on the first sentence, the education is simply free via four channels of public access.

Access point number one) Online classes.

The information is spoon fed class-by-class. There are specific lectures where the camera is set up in the back and what you see on video is what sitting there in Sloan would be. Sloan is a building at MIT. While Alfred Sloan did not start GM (Billy Durant did), he does get credit for it. There are often certificate of completions (no, you do not get a degree).

Access point number two: Sitting in on classes.

Use the technology of emailing a professor to request permission to sit in on classes. Typically, if you’ve the moxie to request attendance along with the basic qualifications of attending a college, you are welcome. Obviously, you must take the prerequisite classes. Obviously, you should buy a textbook, class materials and pre-study a little.

Access point number three: all those online videos.

Videos of lectures are worth gold. There are massive libraries of these lectures on a tech website called YouTube. Majority of these cost zero. Correlate the videos of the professor reading aloud from their published textbook, with the textbook you can buy used online and you have a simulated Ivy League experience without the mountain of school loan debt.

Access point number four of Ivy League Schools: The Entrepreneurship Weeks.

What they do teach you at Stanford business school is that some of the best educational content takes place during Entrepreneurship Month at Stanford Mall. What they don’t teach you at b-school, they now do teach you at business school. But it was first taught at an entrepreneurship week (or month, as is the case at Stanford). E-week is open to the public. Entrepreneur week is open to “the community”. E-weeks are living breathing, open sourced events where a little bit of preparation, some self-study and some impetus can get you more access than an actual enrolled student.

Actual enrolled students begin to massively take for granted access to supplemental school resources. In schools where resources are massively overflowing, like Stanford, incentives are used to lure Stanford students into Stanford hosted events such as drawing to win an iPad, free food and even free gifts.

There are two good books about this: “Hacking Your Education” by Dale Stephens and Mark McCormack, “What They Do Not Teach You at Harvard Business School”.