"He's amazing," she says. "That's what's nice about being able to take classes while you're working at Harvard. You can still have access to excellent professors."

In addition, the program's small fees--employees enrolling in the program typically pay only 10 percent of the cost of courses--gives many people access to a Harvard education who would not ordinarily be able to afford it, said Assistant Dean of Continuing Education L. Dodge Fernald.

He recalled a Harvard electrician without much formal education who got a Ph.D. through TAP, and then went on to teach in the extension school.

"She kind of thought, 'Hey, there's some education to be had here,' and TAP paid for it," Fernald says.

Among the most popular classes taken through TAP, says Doherty, are classes at the Extension School which teach English as a second language.

Patricia C. Machado, who works as an I.D. checker in Adams House dining hall, estimates that about a quarter of the full-time staff at the dining hall have taken English classes through TAP.

Machado, whose husband works in the Pforzheimer dining hall, says the promise of inexpensive English classes and long summer vacations led her to work at Harvard when she first moved to the U.S. from Portugal nine years ago.