Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 245, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1914 — EXTEND EDUCATION [ARTICLE]

EXTEND EDUCATION

University Extension Work Accomplishing Big Results. "V, v * Bureau of Education In Washington Describes How -Universities and Colleges Are Reaching Thousands of Students in U. 8. How universities and colleges, both public and private, in every- state in the Union, are reaching with instruction, not only students who come for the regular college course, but also thousands of other men and women eager for educational opportunities, is described in a bulletin on “University Extension in the United States,” published by the bureau of education. Dean L. E. Reber, director of the extension department of the University of Wisconsin and a leader in the movement to make the university serve* the state, is the compiler of the bureau’s bulletin on the subject. Dean Reber shows that, while elements, of university extension work appear as early'as 1831 in the United States, the real beginning of the movement was in 1887, and its most rapid development has taken place in the last half dozen years In 1891 twenty-eight states and territories reported university extension (n some form. Between 1892 and 1906 tWelve institutions organized extension teaching, mainly in agriculture, and since 1906 twenty-one others have reorganized their extension work on a basis of separate divisions or departments. Beginning largely as correspondence, bulletin, and package library work, university extension has now come to include all university service done away from the institution, as well as a certain kind of work done within t£e institution, such as popular short courses, conferences, extra lectures, and the like. Many of the universities give correspondence courses in college subjects and allow credit for such work .toward the regular collegiate degrees. In discussing Dean Reber’s findings. Doctor Claxton, United States commissioner of education, declares: “No longer do colleges and universities confine their work within their own walls. More and more they attempt to reach all the people of the communities to which they minister. The campus of the state university has come to be co-extensive with the borders of the state whose people tax themselves for its support. “The great universities with large

endowments attempt to serve still larger areas in this popular way. Wherever men and women labor in the heat, or toil in the shadows, in field or forest, or mill or shop or mine, in legislative halls or executive offices, in society or in the hf£>me, at any task requiting an exact knowledge of facts, principles, or laws, there the modern university sees its duty and its opportunity.”