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 Leagueuniversity unenrolled and undetected, says GuillaumeDumas, a 28-year-old Canadian, start with biglecture courses. If you must sit in on a smallerseminar class, it’s important to show upconsistently starting with the first session, insteadof halfway through the semester. Also, one of thebest alibis is that you’re enrolled as a liberal-artsstudent. “That`s the kind of program that`s filledwith everything and that you expect people to be abit weird, a bit confused about what they do,” hesays.

如果你想要混進常春藤大學里蹭課而不被發(fā)現(xiàn)，那么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，那么最好第一節(jié)課就出現(xiàn)在教室，并且保持高出勤率。還有，最好的掩護就是說自己是“人文學院的學生”，因為“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么。”

 

 

From 2008 to 2012, Dumas claims he did stints on a number of elite North Americanuniversities—Yale, Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and McGill, to name a few—sitting in onclasses, attending parties, and living near campus as if he were an enrolled student. Thisdeception may sound like a lead-up to a true-crime story, but Dumas’s exploits appear to beharmless, done in a spirit of curiosity. "A lot of students are bored in class," he observes, "soif you participate, if you ask questions, if you are genuinely interested in the class, I think theteacher 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注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。但是杜馬斯似乎并無惡意，只是出于好奇。他發(fā)現(xiàn)，“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(xiàn)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 haveskyrocketed, it makes sense that people might try to siphon off some of the benefits of collegewithout paying. While the specifics of what Dumas told me may be hard to confirm, the factremains 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?

杜馬斯的故事并非天方夜譚，因為(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(jié)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(wǎng)的打造又是否可獨立存在?如果是這樣，那么花錢上大學還剩下了什么?

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 toleave campus if he or she was attending class without authorization, but added, “Stanford hasa relatively small student body and a close-knit student community. It would be challengingfor someone to go unnoticed.” Yale’s spokesperson said that someone like Dumas would betrespassing, and noted that he could instead take some of the free courses Yale offers online.

杜馬斯曾經(jīng)蹭過課的一些學校代表稱，雖然他們并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(fā)言人曾表示，在斯坦福，如果有學生未經(jīng)允許進教室蹭課，那么他/她將被驅(qū)逐出校園，但其同時也表示“斯坦福的學生較少，學生間的來往更為密切，因此想要混入學校、不被發(fā)現(xiàn)并非易事”。耶魯大學的發(fā)言人則認為杜馬斯這樣的行為屬于非法進入，建議其他像杜馬斯一樣的人可以在線上耶魯?shù)拿赓M課程。

But according to Dumas, one of the best perks of college that’s available for free is thenetworking. “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 somany smart, cool, open-minded, crazy people can be concentrated,” he says. “And when youthink of all the dropouts right now that start companies and stuff, it`s all people that didn`tneed a diploma, that didn`t need to pay anything. They went to school to open their minds andmeet friends, or meet strategy partners, or something like that.”

但是，對于杜馬斯而言，上大學最大的好處之一就是免費建立的人脈關(guān)系。他說，“我覺得在那里最重要的就是結(jié)交朋友、建立人脈關(guān)系、利用好社交資源。比如在伯克利或是耶魯，那里聚集著很多聰慧、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(chuàng)業(yè)的人，他們都是對文憑毫無興趣，也無需為上大學買單;他們上學不過是為了開拓思維、廣交朋友、邂逅合伙人。

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 adiploma, how can Dumas prove to anyone—a potential employer—that he’s undergone anintellectually stimulating experience?

從這一點來看，文憑不過是一張制作精良的收據(jù)。它并不能說明你在學校學到了什么，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板或是其他人證明，自己曾經(jīng)接受過這樣“挑戰(zhàn)智商”的教育呢?

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

當今，無需學位也可大獲成功。Facebook創(chuàng)始人馬克•扎克伯格，以及無數(shù)創(chuàng)業(yè)成功的年輕人都證明了這一點。紐約聯(lián)邦儲備銀行與麻省理工學院的研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，求職者是否在公司內(nèi)部有人脈才是求職申請能否通過的關(guān)鍵。

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

當然，杜馬斯也承認，如果大家都像他這么做，也許這個方法就不會奏效了。但是它確實適用于某些人(除了一些學位即專業(yè)性證書的領(lǐng)域，比如工程師或是醫(yī)生)。杜馬斯說，“他們可以省下學費，用這些錢去環(huán)游世界或是創(chuàng)業(yè)，而不是在約翰霍普金斯大學里拿一個哲學文憑。”