“I was just sneaking into classrooms in literature and philosophy and poli-sci and even psychiatry,” he says. Soon, sitting in on classes he wasn’t signed up for started to feel natural. “I just found out how to do it. When to hide. What kind of alibi to have or to behave with other students—what to tell, what not to tell,” he says. He erred on the side of staying secretive.
Dumas started taking classes at other campuses nearby: Concordia University, University of Montreal, and McGill University. He started thinking bigger. Providence, Rhode Island, the home of Brown University, was fewer than six hours away by car, and New Haven wasn’t much farther. Dumas says he attended Yale in the spring of 2009, couchsurfing for about a month, and he spent time at Brown too. He says he was taking classes and spending only a few hundred dollars a month, most of it on alcohol for parties. When he later went to UC Berkeley, where he lived at a campus co-op for about two months, his expenses were larger—$600 or $700 a month, in his estimation. While at these schools, he reaped most of the perks of college: learning, partying, and meeting intelligent, like-minded people.
Full tuition at Yale for the 2014-2015 school year, which includes room, board, and books, is $63,250. This breaks down to a little over $7,000 per month during Yale’s academic school year, which means Dumas was getting most of the selling points of college at about a tenth of the cost.
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