Article December 12, 1901 Issue

What University Extension has Achieved

In a remarkably candid article in the Atlantic, Lyman P. Powell sums up the gains of the university extension movement since its inception ten years ago. He concludes as follows:—

In the last decade of the nineteenth century almost two thousand courses of six lectures each, and sometimes twelve, aggregating about 125,000 lectures in literature, history, civics, economics, finance, science, sociology, philosophy, ethics, religion, music, and art were given in three hundred and ninety-eight centres, with a total attendance on courses of almost or quite three hundred thousand, with an aggregate attendance on lectures of about two million five hundred thousand, at a cost to the two head centres of $480,000, of which amount $326,000, or sixty-eight per cent, has been paid by the audiences hearing the lectures. If statistics were offered about other societies and institutions that have carried on the work with more or less success, the figures would be larger still.

Keeping in mind the important circumstance that the last two years have been, for both the 'American Society and the University of Chicago, the most successful in their history in all the more important aspects of the work, and that in both Philadelphia and Chicago larger plans for the future are now being made, with more confidence than ever in the past, is it not time for all the fair-minded to assume that university extension is no longer an experiment, but a permanent fact in our educational life, a permanent factor in our educational progress?

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