Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. They used some of it to put their courses on the internet for free.
You don't need to apply. You don't need SAT scores. You don't need to move to Cambridge or pay $80,000 a year. You just go to pll.harvard.edu, pick a course, and start learning. Today, if you want.
There are hundreds of them. Python programming. Data science. Artificial intelligence. Business writing. Negotiation. Public health. Constitutional law. The science of happiness. How to build a startup. How financial markets work. How to think like a computer scientist.
The free tier gets you everything — all the lectures, all the assignments, all the course materials. If you want a verified certificate with your name on it to put on your LinkedIn or resume, that costs money (usually $50–200 depending on the course). But the education itself? Free.
CS50 is the one that gets mentioned most. It's Harvard's intro to computer science course — arguably the most famous intro programming course in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken it online. It's genuinely hard and genuinely good. David Malan has been teaching it for decades and he's one of the best lecturers alive.
But don't sleep on everything else. The writing courses are excellent. The health and medicine courses are legitimately useful. The data science track will make you more valuable at almost any job. The AI courses are current.
This is not a collection of YouTube videos stapled together. These are real courses with real structure, real problem sets, and real professors who built their careers on this material.
The only thing missing is the $300,000 in student loans.
Go learn something.