These totally free online Yale classes

Don’t you want to know why this Yale professor is gesticulating? Boy OH BOY I do!

Don’t you want to know why this Yale professor is gesticulating? Boy OH BOY I do!

Turns out, you don’t need to bribe anyone to go to Yale! Yale invites you in for free!

Okay, okay — so you don’t really get to GO TO Yale, getting a degree and all. You don’t get to talk to the fancy professors, eat in the fancy dining halls, or feel nearly as elite as you might if you were some 19-year-old kid wandering around Yale’s campus feeling truly for the first time that THE WORLD IS MINE. But you can, courtesy of the rather excellent collection of classes Yale offers for free online through their Open Yale Courses program, check out some of what Yalies get to learn.

You’ve got syllabi. You’ve got recorded video lectures. You’ve even got a 10% discount on many of the books you’ll need to follow along. But you don’t have to get up early. You don’t have to stay up all night doing any of those silly papers that the actual Yale students have to do. You don’t have to pay anyone a gazillion dollars for the privilege of dipping into this semi-exclusive pool of knowledge and insight. Best of all, you don’t have to stare at the back of that smug know-it-all student’s head all class period long. What’s not to love? Check out the full list.

To give you a preview, here are some that seem particularly cool to me: