Looking to get your college education for free? These elite colleges offer a variety of programs that allow you to study and/or audit courses to learn from some of the top professors in the country and start your college education for free:
This honorable institution has educated some of the most brilliant minds of our time, from Nobel Prize winning laureates such as Sinclair Lewis and George Whipple to Pulitzer Prize winners like David McCullough, Thornton Wilder and Bob Woodward.
The Open Yale Courses are a great place to start your online education. The program offers a wealth of deep information on a variety of scientific, historical and artistic subjects from some of the university’s top professors. The online college courses can be viewed through YouTube and iTunes to help you learn from the bigwigs on the go.
This storied university has long focused on producing the brightest technical and mechanical minds in the world. The Open Courseware section of the school’s site focuses on scientific and technical courses, including architecture, engineering, biology and physics.
The site also offers some very unique online courses you probably won’t find elsewhere. The Lego robotics course teaches the principals of mechanical systems and engineering using the popular toy. There’s also a chemistry course that focuses on sports.
This historic medical school and science research institution has long striven to make its coursework more accessible. With the convenience of the Internet, even non-students who don’t have time to sit through four years of medical school can benefit from the institution’s resources.
Tufts offers a variety of medical classes on their Open Courseware site, including dentistry and nutrition science. They also have diverse arts and science courses, including a film course that examines how media can serve social change, and a “Physics for Humanists” lecture series.
When you think of top medical schools and health science research facilities, Johns Hopkins is at the top of nearly everyone’s list. Check out some of its Open Courseware classes which focus solely on health, and dive deep into specific medial topics. The free courses cover the entire spectrum of human development, from genetics to aging, and offer more pressing topics such as population science and public health preparedness.
This prestigious school also has a long and storied tradition in the American educational system, and you can access part of it via iTunes. Stanford’s iTunesU offers a number of free lectures available for download in MP3 format. The courses are quite varied and detailed — from the art of robotics to a look at the legal history of the gay marriage debate.
Princeton doesn’t offer as many free courses on their iTunesU page, probably because this pricey and prestigious institution still wants you to actually pay to attend. Still, what the online offerings lack in quantity, they more than make up for in quality.
There’s a series of lectures each semester from Princeton’s world-famous architecture school, lectures on women in computer sciences from the Center for Computational Intractability, and a special “Engineering the Future” series of lectures from the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
This legendary learning institution has produced some of the most brilliant and innovative minds of our time, and thanks to its offerings on iTunesU, you can become one of them without even opening your checkbook.
The free online college courses come from a number of different campus schools, such as the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard also offers some of the most timely courses on events throughout the world, such as the recent series on “Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age” that covers the days of Watergate to the controversial WikiLeaks memos.