Grants help P&S staff study toward their dreams

Lynette Sherer (left), a 27-year employee of ISU, will graduate May 11 with her youngest child, Tara Moses. Photo by Bob Elbert.

by Anne Krapfl
May 11 -- graduation day at Iowa State -- probably can't come fast enough for Lynette Sherer. Mother of three adult children and currently an administrative specialist at the Virtual Reality Applications Center in Howe Hall, Sherer is closing in this spring on a 14-year pursuit: her bachelor's degree. She credits Iowa State's P&S tuition grant program with helping her earn a degree in finance.

"I'm extremely grateful to the university for this program, and to my managers who let me do this and manage a job," Sherer said. "Especially when I began my coursework, without the grants, it would have been too much of a financial burden on my family to do this."

Beside the break from year-round homework, she is excited about sharing commencement day with her youngest daughter, Tara Moses, a graduating senior in industrial engineering.

"This is one of the greatest accomplishments I'll ever feel in my life," Sherer said. "My kids were young when I started and I knew it would take a while -- if I knew then I'd be 50 when I finished, I might have been discouraged from trying." Sherer said it takes the right balance of patience and persistence to earn a college degree one class, one semester at a time. But there are others like her on campus, hungry enough to put up with the significant juggling act -- classes, homework, family, job responsibilities -- for a decade or more.

Pat Strah, budget officer in the office of the vice president for business and finance, spent eight years finishing the last three years of her bachelor's degree in accounting. She took a year off and in 1990 started on a master's degree in public administration. After five years of graduate classes, a "mental block or two" and a few years to complete her creative component, she received her master's degree in August 2000, again with considerable help from the tuition grant program.

"The first degree was to get me out of clerical work. The second degree both added to my qualifications and knowledge, and lets me apply for some jobs as they come up," she said.

"The tuition grants were very, very helpful for me," Strah said. "They let me go to class, for one thing. Early on, my kids were very small, so the money really made a difference. I primarily had to pay for books."


How it works
Last year (FY01), 223 grants totaling $110,743 reimbursed P&S employees for classes they took toward degrees or in certification programs (an average grant of about $496). The P&S tuition grant program presently guarantees reimbursement for up to three undergraduate or graduate credits per semester at ISU tuition rates, regardless of where the class is taken. Employees must have worked at Iowa State full time for a year (or the equivalent) to be eligible and must receive a passing grade in a class to receive reimbursement.

Since the fall of 1993, a separate tuition grant fund for Professional and Scientific employees has existed in the Provost Office budget. Prior to this, P&S and Merit employees shared a fund. (The Merit tuition grant program also continues to grow; funding for the program this year is at $43,912.)

Dan Woodin, information systems leader for ADP and former P&S Council president who led the request to split the tuition grant fund into two, said the intent was to do a better job of funding requests and meeting the needs of two different employee groups. For example, he said P&S employees tended to take more graduate-level courses than Merit employees, so the "everyone gets $150 this semester" approach wasn't as useful to P&S. In the five years before the split, Woodin said individual P&S grant awards varied from 33 percent to 68 percent of requested amounts, depending on how many eligible applicants there were in any given school term.

After several more years of the council and the P&S professional development committee monitoring demand for the program, the tuition reimbursement fund took another leap forward. In the summer of 1997, former president Martin Jischke committed $40,000 to the previous $56,500-$58,500 annual allocations. The three-credit guarantee was created, with the provost and vice president for business and finance promising to fund the difference between the $98,000 budgeted amount and actual reimbursement payout.

This "pilot" project has operated on a year-to-year basis since. For the current fiscal year, $123,838 is budgeted for P&S tuition reimbursement grants. A mandatory cost increase to offset tuition increases is included in the provost office budget request for the fiscal year that begins July 1.


Every bit helps
Scott Openshaw and Jeff Mohr are two more P&S employees grateful for the financial assistance of the tuition grants. Openshaw, formerly an academic adviser in mechanical engineering who switched to full-time student status this spring, is two years away from a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Mohr, an Extension program specialist in product development at the Center for Industrial Research and Service, has received tuition grants since fall semester 1999 while working on a master's degree in systems engineering, one class at a time. He said he hopes he's a few months away from completion. Both Mohr and Openshaw say they would have sought advanced degrees without the tuition assistance, but acknowledged the grants helped ease their costs.

Prior to his arrival at ISU in August 1998, Openshaw said tuition assistance was part of the discussion at his job interview. And while his family members work at other universities that offer 100 percent tuition reimbursement, Openshaw, who routinely takes five to six credits each semester, said every bit helps.

Mohr said expectations about a master's degree came up during his interview process. He's glad to be taking classes that help him do better work on the job and be a more consistent contributor to his engineering team. He also is hopeful that a master's degree will help him get reclassified to a higher P-level position, which in turn would allow him to serve as a principal investigator on sponsored research projects.


Success
Two years ago, Sherer started taking two classes a semester in order to finish this spring, after missing her first goal: graduate from Iowa State with her middle child.

"Many times I wondered how I'd do it," she admitted. "There were several times I dropped out for a semester after being overwhelmed the previous semester. But then I'd get back in it.

"I always applied for tuition grants and I always received something," she added. "I can't say enough about the program."

So, what's next for this perpetual juggler, who also owns a photography business?

"Volunteering," she said without hesitation. "I have wanted for a long time to volunteer, and now I will take the time to do things like that."