IStock Photo 8814827 © VMJones

Seats in university lectures are filling up fast these days. If you’d like to be guaranteed one, take a cue from Albert Einstein and stay in your pajamas: in his later years lecturing in Princeton, NJ, the physicist eschewed suit jackets in favor of an oversized grey sweatshirt. You can see it in TIME’s Person of the Century cover photo—the Person, of course, is Einstein.

Consider, for a moment, the challenges inherent in getting to college and staying there. There’s the matriculation rate: the odds a high-school graduate will go to college within a year of graduation are 1 in 1.61 (62%). That’s not even two-thirds. The odds are almost as high that a woman sleeps in pajamas: 1 in 1.82 (55%).

Then there’s the dropout rate. Within six years, 13% of first-time college students will drop out of school. That’s 1 in 7.58 undergrads dropping out—roughly the same odds that a man sleeps in pajamas: 1 in 7.69.

And finally, there’s the acceptance rate. This year, many universities will send out more rejections than ever before. Take the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance: the odds an applicant to MIT will be admitted are 1 in 8.01. For every eight decision letters MIT posts, seven of them will be disappointingly thin. (For places like Stanford, Yale, and Harvard, the odds are even lower.) Or take William and Mary, the second-oldest institute of tertiary education in the US: two of every three applicants are likely to be rejected this year. The odds an applicant to the College of William and Mary will be admitted are 1 in 2.97, almost exactly the odds that an adult will, yes, sleep in pajamas.

For the thousands of high-school seniors each spring who develop a mailbox-checking compulsion, the odds of admission are a little slimmer this year. Of course, everything depends on who you are. If you are one of the 1 in 5,152 who aced the SAT, for example, your chances of admission may be somewhat higher. But realistically, for a random applicant, the doors to the storied lecture halls are likely to be locked from the inside.

That doesn’t keep you from peeking through keyholes, though. Many universities are now directly posting lecture content online, but it often proves difficult to find. Enter websites like Academic Earth, Online Universities, Fora.TV, or BigThink, all of which collect lecture URLs in one location, one-stop-shop fashion. The Washington Post described Academic Earth as “the Hulu for education.” Best of all: these pre-gathered online lectures are free to view.

That’s quite a boon for those who think tuition is too steep and colleges too focused on the bottom line (according to a December 2009 survey conducted by Public Agenda, 60% of Americans think so), as well as for students who’d need federal assistance to attend. The odds an undergraduate student will receive federal loans in a year are 1 in 2.95—the same as the odds that an adult sleeps in... well, you know.

Online lectures are available from hundreds of colleges nationwide, from speakers as diverse as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (on religion and globalization) and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (on entrepreneurship). Topics range all over: maxillary sinus dissection at the University of Michigan, the morality of homicide/cannibalism at Harvard, literary papers and J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey at Yale—and you can “attend” all of them from the comfort of your own bed. In your pajamas, of course.