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(More customer reviews)Every evening from September to May, as students at Harvard College stream back to their Houses for dinner, another, much larger and more diverse population arrives to take their places in the College's labs and lecture halls. This group is admitted non-selectively, and therefore may not enjoy quite the same caché as undergraduates who have passed through the eye of Harvard's admissions needle. Yet they are, in many ways, a better educated group (many with advanced degrees), richer in life experience, and often possessing a clearer sense of why they are there. For these reasons among others, many of Harvard's best professors elect to spend their evenings teaching this group.
Three of our daughters attended the Extension School for several years (as homeschooled students) before enrolling as conventional undergraduates at Harvard College, Swarthmore, and Oxford. Through their eyes our family has had an opportunity to compare the Extension School to Harvard College and other selective schools. We can confirm that Extension School courses are often virtually identical to their counterparts at the College (sometimes with the same faculty, syllabi, facilities, and exams). More interesting than the similarities in content is the relatively limited impact of the very different admissions standards on academic peformance. Extension students more than hold their own, sometimes drawing on different sources of strength than their more selectively admitted peers. This underscores the critical importance of high expectations, excellent teaching, and the excitement of accomplishing something difficult, as well as the benefits of a more age-diverse student body. We should perhaps ask ourselves whether the "age segregation" of traditional schools, typically extending from primary grades through university, is a useful or necessary property, or in fact, one that needlessly deprives students of perspectives and experience from which they would benefit.
Few of the nation's top colleges have had the courage or commitment to open their gates as Harvard has for the past century, perhaps for fear of diluting their "brand", perhaps because they haven't understood the benefits. Whatever the reasons, Harvard stands head and shoulders above its peers in this as in so many other areas. The Extension School is, in many ways, Harvard, and our country, at its very best, not just a jewel in the University's crown, but a model from which much can be learned as we seek broader reforms of our nation's education system as a whole.
Michael Shinagel deserves high praise for telling this important story as he has.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910 - 2009 (Harvard University Extension School)
The Gates Unbarred traces the evolution of University Extension at Harvard from the Lyceum movement in Boston to its creation by the newly appointed president A. Lawrence Lowell in 1910. For a century University Extension has provided community access to Harvard, including the opportunity for women and men to earn a degree.
In its storied history, University Extension played a pioneering role in American continuing higher education: initiating educational radio courses with Harvard professors in the late 1940s, followed by collegiate television courses for credit in the 1950s, and more recently Harvard College courses available online. In the 1960s a two-year curriculum was prepared for the U.S. nuclear navy ("Polaris University"), and in the early 1970s Extension responded to community needs by reaching out to Cambridge and Roxbury with special applied programs.
This history is not only about special programs but also about remarkable people, from the distinguished members of the Harvard faculty who taught evenings in Harvard Yard to the singular students who earned degrees, ranging from the youngest ALB at age eighteen, to the oldest ALB and ALM recipients, both aged eighty-nine—and both records at Harvard University.
