 The Boston Globe opined that the early program of courses was "a comprehensive course of study ... which should attract the young men and women of metropolitan Boston who deprived though various circumstances of the opportunity to go to college." The first year of courses saw 863 students enroll, with 395 of them earning certificates. A. Lawrence Lowell, as both president of Harvard and trustee of the Lowell Institute, saw the University Extension as "a trust for the community, for the public, and we are nothing but a successive series of servants to the public."
