Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah and Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, lauded the outcome on Wednesday as a victory for public-private partnerships. It is also a public relations victory for Goldman, which has been trying to reform its reputation as an institution focused solely on the bottom line.

But these are still early days for social impact bonds. The experiment in Utah has only operated for one year and involved 110 schoolchildren. It and other social investments Goldman has made could end up more like the discontinued Rikers program. Even if that happened, the sums involved — in the millions of dollars — are tiny for the megabank.

But Goldman has structured its more recent social impact bonds more like the one in Utah, which expanded on existing programs that had a successful track record. The Rikers program, by contrast, paid for a service that had never been tried before in the prison.

“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”

The $4.6 million put up by Goldman — and the $2.4 million invested by the Pritzker Family Foundation — went toward expanding an existing preschool program for poor children in Salt Lake County.

The program had already been shown to decrease the need for special education, but it had not been able to expand to meet all of the demand.

The Goldman money — which is more of a loan than a bond — allowed another 595 3- and 4-year-olds to attend preschool last year, in addition to the 2,400 or so other children who were already enrolled. Of those new students, tests indicated that without preschool, 110 were likely to need special education.