Thanks to the MIT OpenCourseWare project, education is free for everyone. Without ever paying a dime in tuition, you can watch a complete series of lectures from well-known MIT professors, do the same reading assignments, homework, quizzes and tests as the actual MIT students.
Why are they doing this?It all started in 1999, when MIT Provost Robert A. Brown asked the MIT Council on Education Technology how MIT should position itself in the distance/e-learning environment. The answer was MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW provides a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world, contributing to the "shared intellectual commons." Some people suspect it's a move to undermine fee-based e-learning. Others think it's the greatest possible intellectual gift to mankind. Whatever you choose to believe, this is a personal opportunity not to be missed.
MIT's OpenCourseWare provides over 500 of their top courses online, with an ultimate goal of over 2000 courses. While you won't get actual college credit for these courses or access to MIT faculty, they can still quench your thirst for knowledge. At the end of the day, isn't what you know more important than where you learned it? Some of the greatest innovators have been self-taught. Neither Edison nor Einstein thrived in a traditional educational environment. Ramanujan, one of the great contributors to Mathematics, was entirely self-taught.