Behind the Scenes: Stories from the Harvard Extension School

“We have so many stories,” Ariel Gamiño, A.L.M. ’03, told me late last year, during one of my first interviews for the March-April feature about the Harvard Extension School. Gamiño is president of the school’s alumni association, and he was explaining some of the creative lengths he’d gone to in his effort to build a sense of community among his fellow graduates. It’s a somewhat challenging task. As a continuing education school, which students attend at their own pace (and, these days, mostly online) while juggling full-time jobs and family responsibilities, the Harvard Extension School (HES) doesn’t have all the shared touchstones of a traditional university experience that alumni associations often draw on.

But what it has instead—and what makes it vibrant in a different way, Gamiño believes—is an abundance of stories. People come to HES for all kinds of reasons, from all kinds of educational backgrounds. Most are in their 30s or older, already deep into adult lives and careers. And their numbers are huge: HES enrolls more than 13,000 students annually, about 4,000 of whom are working toward bachelor’s and master’s degrees. That’s a lot of stories. 

And yet, it’s possible to spend years at Harvard without hearing much at all about HES. More than one graduate I spoke with described having to explain what HES is to other Harvard alumni at networking events. And for us at Harvard Magazine, that’s really where the motivation for this feature began, with a desire to understand—and to explain to readers—how exactly HES works and what it looks like to get an education there. Famously open enrollment, the school has a demanding admissions process for people who want to earn a degree. And despite seeming unfamiliar to many on campus, it’s been a part of the University for more than a century, founded decades before Harvard’s graduate schools of design, education, and public policy. 

If there’s one story people do know about HES, it’s the angsty debate about whether the school and its graduates are “really” a part of Harvard, an institution whose prestige and reputation are partly tied to its exclusivity. For years, some HES students and graduates have complained about feeling held at arm’s length by the University’s administration and alumni from other schools at Harvard.

This tension is partly what propelled me and my editors to want to find out more, not just about HES but also about the people who seek degrees there. Who are they? What brings them to the school? What does the education mean to them, and how does it fit into the larger story of their lives? When we started asking those questions, what we found was, to echo Gamiño, so many stories. More, in fact, than we could fit into the feature. One was about Maleeha Habib, A.L.M. ’21, who studied environmental sustainability at HES, a field she had wanted to pursue as a college student in the early 2000s, but couldn’t—back then few universities in her home country of Pakistan offered it, and she couldn’t afford to go abroad. As an HES student, she would wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. to log onto her classes online from Karachi and was so nervous about passing the HES admission requirements that for an entire year, she told no one except her husband. 

I also spoke to Peter Ogunkanmi, an engineer in Nigeria—“the son of a taxi driver!” he told me proudly—who is currently studying for a HES master’s in global development. He’s hoping to use his education to help design new monetary policies that can aid Nigeria’s struggling economy. 

And I interviewed Suzanne Spreadbury, Ed.M. ‘93, dean of academic programs at HES, who began working in the Harvard registrar’s office more than 30 years ago. She arrived at HES soon afterward, when she started taking classes in women’s studies and feminist theory. Her mother had gotten a college degree by going to night school, and Spreadbury told me that as soon as she stepped into the classroom at HES, “I thought, ‘I found my people. This is my place.’” When a job opened up there, she grabbed it. Now she oversees the school’s courses and degree programs. 

When my editors and I set out to answer questions about what exactly HES is and does, it became clear these stories and others were an important part of the answer. It was instructive and often inspiring to hear them, including the ones that didn’t make it into print. And it’s been instructive to hear from HES alumni who have written to the magazine since the feature was published, to share their own stories about both the joy and difficulty of their Harvard experience. 

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