The Man Who Snuck Into the Ivy League Without Paying a Thing
But according to Dumas, one of the best perks 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.”
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, or even me—that he’s undergone an intellectually stimulating experience?
.. 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.