After spending decades helping many UW-Madison students pay for a college education, director of the Office of Financial Aid Susan Fischer will retire this week, ending a career that started by chance in 1979.
Fischer earned a degree in natural resources and soils without financial aid. She paid for school by working and through help from her parents and grandmother, according to a university release.
Fischer returned to UW-Madison to pursue a second undergraduate degree. When she ran out of money to pursue her degree, she began a temporary job in the financial aid office, filing and processing applications.
She found she enjoyed the work and ended up being hired on a permanent basis in 1983. She was then promoted to associate director in 1992 before becoming the office director in 2004, a job she said sometimes presented challenges.
“You will have a lot of hard conversations,” Fischer said in the release. “While the amounts we are able to provide have improved dramatically over the last decade, it’s still not enough and you will have to counsel people who are going to be very disappointed in the amount they are getting.”
Despite the difficulties, Fischer said she appreciated the work she did with students.
“If you don’t like students, we don’t have a place for you here,” Fischer said in the release. “This is a student-centric office.”
Financial aid has become more available to students since she began her career, but Fischer said there are still improvements to be made. Students’ best options for financial help in the future may be endowment and scholarships.
“Chancellor Blank wants every smart kid in Wisconsin to come here,” Fischer said in the release. “She understands that we are not where we should be in terms of providing aid to students, and her plans to leverage funding through the capital campaign is an exciting opportunity. If it is successful, and I hope that it is, more Wisconsin students will be able to access a world-class education with less debt.”
Fischer’s work was appreciated throughout campus, according to Provost Sarah Mangelsdorf.
“Susan is an incredibly engaged leader in financial aid matters at the state and national level, and has kept campus informed of impending changes,” Mangelsdorf said in the release.
Although Fischer may not have used financial aid to earn her degree, her mastery of the system has helped countless students over the last 30 years to earn theirs.
