The admissions scandal seems to have revived interest in my 2018 Los Angeles Times op-ed. Highlight from the original piece:
Almost everyone pays lip service to the glories of education, but actions speak louder than words. Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning.
A few days ago, I received the following email. Note that I had the good sense to write “almost no one tries this route,” so you should take it as confirmation of my original thesis. Reprinted with permission of the father who sent it and the son he describes.
Hi Bryan:
Just read your article and almost got a whiplash from doing a double-take….
You wrote almost verbatim what my son did….
Its sort of a long story, but my son dropped out of High School in order to travel to Princeton to be a guest of the CogSci/Linguistics department. He ended up studying there for an entire year (for free) before coming back to Oakland CA and beginning community college.
Right now he is gunning to get into UC Berkeley’s linguistics department.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Mar 20 2019 at 1:40pm
And notice that it would not have been a counterexample to your claim even if you had made the stronger claim without the “almost.” His son stayed at Princeton for a year, not four.
JayT
Mar 20 2019 at 5:45pm
Also, the fact that the kid is now going to college “for real” also shows that he finds the diploma to have significant value.
Dylan
Mar 20 2019 at 3:20pm
My first time through college I dropped out just shy of getting a degree from my mid-tier state school and took a few months on the road through North America. When I was in a college town I frequently would find a class schedule and go in sit in on a class or two in whatever subject seemed the most interesting, although I mostly limited it intro classes with large lecture halls where I figured I wouldn’t be noticed. I spent some time in Boston on my trip and wanted to go sit in on classes at Harvard or M.I.T., but the mystique of those schools psyched me out, and I was sure that I’d be found out as a fraud if I tried it there. I rarely sat in on more than a single lecture from the same class though, let alone take 4 years worth.
mib8
Mar 25 2019 at 3:01pm
I concur. The one time I audited, they ran me through the hoops, anyway (run a mile across campus to this building & office to get form A-23 signed by this dean, run over there to get form C-785 signed by that bureaubum, oay beaucoup bux to that bureaubum and bring them all over there… what?! you should have gotten form C-785/g, we’ll take these but you have to start over…. obviously part of the president’s fitness program).
Caplan’s writing that many unis allowed drop-ins, even at my 5*great-grand-father’s hoity-toity alma mater, was a surprise…a bit shocking, even.
While I did see some drops in attendance at some classes, many were pretty much SRO…or such small sections that any interlopers were not welcome.
Floccina
Mar 26 2019 at 12:30pm
When I was in college, I sat in on a few classes of my friends, waiting for rides.
Weir
Mar 21 2019 at 6:35am
There was a real-life David Hampton who pretended to be a student at Harvard, and there’s also a fictional character called Doug Fine who is an actual student at Dartmouth.
Now the fake student based on David Hampton gets one great scene after another in Six Degrees of Separation, but the real student called Doug Fine just gets a single brief speech, and it ends with him yelling at his obstetrician dad, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” And this is the stage direction: “(Doug goes into the dark, screaming.)”
Which is a very funny moment in a very funny play, but it also rips out the foundations or the premise of all the scenes leading up to it. Because this is how a real student talks. The actual student is a shrieking, ungrateful, whiny basket-case and brat, whereas the con-man who never actually went to college is cultured and thoughtful and elegant and poised.
The fake student thought that, in order to pass himself off as something he’s not, he needs to be able to expatiate on Salinger and Beckett. The real student simply yells at his dad: “Why did you bring me into this world?”
So the mistake of the con-man was to think that a student is well-spoken and intelligent. Not so. The actual student gets a certificate, and that’s what David Hampton never got.
François Godard
Mar 31 2019 at 3:55am
Pro Caplan,
Please expand: Do you mean that a ‘free-rider’ would be able to get his teachers accept that he submits essays and attends exams? Without these interactions his classes would be far less useful, no? They would amount to listening to conferences or lectures through YouTube?
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