page_title: History of Harvard Extension School
section_title: Establishment of the University Extension
hierarchical_section_title: History of Harvard Extension School / Early years / Establishment of the University Extension
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Abbott Lawrence Lowell
context_page_description: The history of the Harvard Extension School dates back to its founding in 1910 by Abbott Lawrence Lowell. From the beginning, the Harvard Extension School was designed to serve the educational interests and needs of the greater Boston community, but has since extended its academic resources to the public, locally, nationally, and internationally.
  Growing out of the Lowell Institute, it first became the Commission on University Extension in cooperation with other Boston-area universities, and then eventually became a Harvard-only institution. Early students were able to earn an Associate in Arts degree, which was the equivalent of a bachelor's degree but which did have a residency requirement. That was later renamed an Adjunct in Arts before finally settling on a bachelor's degree. The first graduate degree was awarded in 1980.
  The Harvard Extension School has been a leader in distance education, offering courses on the radio and television, and even on board Navy ships. Online education began in the mid-1980s, and in 2012 the school partnered with EdX to expand its reach. After 100 years, an estimated 500,000 students have taken courses at the Extension School.
context_section_description: The lack of an endowment was one reason why Harvard President Charles William Eliot declined to begin a continuing education program in 1902.  "I would strongly disapprove of starting the proposed institute without an endowment," Eliot said.  "It should not be dependent on other institutions."  At a meeting of the Boston City Club in 1909, A. Lawrence Lowell said that John Lowell, Jr. had wanted to found a "popular university" and that in order to fulfill that vision it had to be connected to an already existing educational institution.
  When A. Lawrence Lowell succeeded his father as trustee of the Lowell Institute in 1900, he was already a trustee at both Harvard and MIT.  He reorganized the lectures first as the School for Industrial Foremen at MIT, and then later renamed it the Lowell Institute School "under the auspices of MIT."  The first year of the School had courses in "the higher branches" of mathematics, and the second year was devoted to theory and practice.  Between 30 and 50 men graduated from the program each year.
  In 1907 the Lowell Institute School began offering courses at Harvard, and the a course on literature had to turn people away because the largest hall Harvard had could only seat 300 persons.  Most classes, taught by "the best Harvard professors," had roughly 20 students, and at "the end of the course the same examination is taken" that Harvard College students would take.
  Two years later, in 1909, A. Lawrence Lowell was elected president of Harvard.  As president, A. Lawrence Lowell wanted to serve the "many people in our community, who have not been to college, but who have the desire and the aptitude to profit by so much of a college education as, amid the work of earning their living, they are able to obtain."
  James Hardy Ropes, the Extension's first dean, said that "our aim will be to give the young people of Boston who have heretofore been prevented from securing a college education the same instruction they would receive were they undergraduates at Harvard."  He added that "many persons who wish that they had a college education will be able to get gradually an effective substitute for it--in some respects more effective than the ordinary college education because of the greater eagerness and maturity of such students."  Students under 20 were not permitted, unless they had been graduated from high school, but adults were not required to have a high school diploma.
  In the spring of 1910, a few months before the first students would enroll, A. Lawrence Lowell wrote to the Boston School Department asking which courses the University Extension could offer that the School Department would accept as qualifications for a teaching position at Boston Latin or one of the other high schools in the city.  In September of that year the School Committee voted to accept the Extension's Associate of Arts degree as sufficient to teach in a high school.  It was noted that elementary school teachers could take the courses in the evenings and qualify for a better paying high school teaching position.  The same was true for other young workers as well, Ropes said.
  When the University Extension was announced it garnered major media coverage in Boston.  the Boston Globe declared the Extension program to be "one of the hopeful signs of the times--this democratization of education," congratulating the Extension for "the fine opportunities offered to those who hunger and thirst after knowledge."
caption: A. Lawrence Lowell
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