If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy¹ 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 halfway³ through the semester. Also, one of the best alibis⁴ is that you’re enrolled² 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 weird⁵, a bit confused about what they do,” he says.

如果你想要混进常春藤大学里蹭课而不被发现，那么就从人多的大课开始——这正是今年28岁的加拿大“蹭课大神”纪尧姆•杜马斯的建议。如果你一定要蹭人少的课，那么最好第一节课就出现在教室，并且保持高出勤率。还有，最好的掩护就是说自己是“人文学院的学生”，因为“这些学院的项目总是囊括所有，让人们不知道学生们都在学些什么。”

From 2008 to 2012, Dumas claims he did stints⁶ on a number of elite⁷ 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 deception⁸ 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."

杜马斯称自己在2008年至2012年间曾出入北美诸多一流高校，如耶鲁、布朗、加州大学伯克利分校、斯坦福、麦吉尔大学等等；他像这些学校的正式注册生一样住在学校附近、去上课，参加派对。这样的“行骗”过程，听来马上就要演变成一个真实的犯罪故事。但是杜马斯似乎并无恶意，只是出于好奇。他发现，“大部分学生都对课程兴味索然，所以只要你积极参与、提问、表现出对课程的兴趣，老师就会对你青睐有加。”

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 remains⁹ that a young adult could conceivably infiltrate¹⁰ a college campus without paying tuition. What might this say about the monetary¹¹ value of a diploma? And can its component¹² parts—learning, socializing, networking—be unbundled? If so, what would remain?

杜马斯的故事并非天方夜谭，因为（英美国）大学学费高昂，人们想要免费享受些高校资源的心理不难理解。虽然杜马斯故事的细节有待考证，但是一个年轻人能够不付学费就混进大学已是事实。通过这个故事，我们是否看到了文凭本身金钱价值？学校课程、高校社交与人脉网的打造又是否可独立存在？如果是这样，那么花钱上大学还剩下了什么？

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 to leave campus if he or she was attending class without authorization¹³, but added, “Stanford has a relatively¹⁴ 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 trespassing¹⁵, and noted¹⁶ that he could instead take some of the free courses Yale offers online.

杜马斯曾经蹭过课的一些学校代表称，虽然他们并非第一次听说这种情况，但杜马斯确实只是个例。斯坦福的发言人曾表示，在斯坦福，如果有学生未经允许进教室蹭课，那么他/她将被驱逐出校园，但其同时也表示“斯坦福的学生较少，学生间的来往更为密切，因此想要混入学校、不被发现并非易事”。耶鲁大学的发言人则认为杜马斯这样的行为属于非法进入，建议其他像杜马斯一样的人可以在线上耶鲁的免费课程。

But according to Dumas, one of the best perks¹⁷ 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，对于杜马斯而言，上大学最大的好处之一就是免费建立的人脉关系。他说，“我觉得在那里最重要的就是结交朋友、建立人脉关系、利用好社交资源。比如在伯克利或是耶鲁，那里聚集着很多聪慧、新潮、思想开放、甚至疯狂的人。而你再想想那些从中途退学创业的人，他们都是对文凭毫无兴趣，也无需为上大学买单；他们上学不过是为了开拓思维、广交朋友、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 a diploma, how can Dumas prove to anyone—a potential employer—that he’s undergone an intellectually stimulating¹⁸ experience?

从这一点来看，文凭不过是一张制作精良的收据。它并不能说明你在学校学到了什么，只代表你交过学费。但如果没有文凭，杜马斯又要如何向他未来的老板或是其他人证明，自己曾经接受过这样“挑战智商”的教育呢？

But these days, you don’t need a degree to become wildly successful, as Mark Zuckerberg and countless¹⁹ 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.

当今，无需学位也可大获成功。Facebook创始人马克•扎克伯格，以及无数创业成功的年轻人都证明了这一点。纽约联邦储备银行与麻省理工学院的研究人员发现，求职者是否在公司内部有人脉才是求职申请能否通过的关键。

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<sup>20</sup>, 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.

当然，杜马斯也承认，如果大家都像他这么做，也许这个方法就不会奏效了。但是它确实适用于某些人（除了一些学位即专业性证书的领域，比如工程师或是医生）。杜马斯说，“他们可以省下学费，用这些钱去环游世界或是创业，而不是在约翰霍普金斯大学里拿一个哲学文凭。”