Steve Van Ess sums up his 30-year career

Financial aid director grateful for good people

By John Lucas

In March, longtime director of the Office of Student Financial Services Steve Van Ess surprised many of his campus colleagues by announcing his plans to retire.

Van Ess joined the office in 1975 and became director in 1994. A search committee is working to identify his successor. His wife, Ann, an outreach specialist at the Fluno Center, will retire also at the end of September.

Van Ess sat down with John Lucas of University Communications on Aug. 4 to talk about changes on campus, the financial aid landscape and his retirement plans.

A portion of the conversation follows.

Wisconsin Week: Have you come up with new ideas and plans for your retirement since we last talked?
Steve Van Ess: I still don’t have that big exciting thing. I should make something up or just plan something. My initial plans include a home improvement list and my self- improvement list — you know, get in better shape, those kinds of things. We want to do a little bit of travel. We do have some lake property, so we want to spend some time on the water and buy a boat. I’ve always read a lot, so I’ll continue to read.

I used to play golf, but gave it up because of some back problems; I may take another try at that. Ann has always wanted to get back to Spain — she spent her junior year abroad. A lot of little plans. Basically, what I’ve been telling people is that I don’t want to do anything work-related for a year. A year off to catch my breath. More recently, I’ve been saying six months.

Of course, when people hear you’re free a lot of time they have different ideas, most of them volunteer-related, which doesn’t make it bad. Ultimately, I think I’ll get back involved. I’m 55 years old, so I’m not quite ready to go out to seed yet. But it seemed like a good time for a change. I think the office is in good shape. We have a great staff here. Things are always busy, of course, but in terms of transitioning, being here for 30 years, and in terms of financials, it seems like a good time to do this and move on to the next thing.

Since I read a lot, I think I’m going to read up about retirement. There have been various articles about all the different books people write about what people do in retirement, when they’re happy, when they’re sad, things to do. I may study that as a career in itself.

WW: As far as looking back over all these years, what stands out in your mind?
Van Ess: Well, there’s two ways to answer that. One is in terms of tasks and projects, and I could certainly mention that. But the things I’m most proud of are people things, having built a lot of good relationships with a lot of good people.

The thing that struck me was that a phrase that I’ve stolen from somewhere, “People are more fun than anybody.” So I really enjoy working with people. To me it’s really important — the successes that I’ve had aren’t my successes, they’re the successes of the staff here, which is wonderful, most of which have been here since before I was director 11 years ago and Wally [Douma] hired them, so I can’t even take credit for hiring them. We work a lot with staff from admissions, bursar, registrar, housing and other campus offices. We do a lot of partnering on projects.

I’ve been getting all this lumber and things from different agencies and associations (gestures to a pile of plaques and awards) telling me how much I’ve helped. Financial aid is kind of funny, because it’s like a religion. I notice that when people talk about admissions, sometimes they’re a bit competitive. If you have some winning strategy of getting a better applicant pool, you don’t always share it.

Financial aid people are always sharing their ways to get more money, help students, award money, packaging money. It’s very collaborative across the sector, across competing institutions, across states. So one of the things that struck me over the entire 30-year period is that all the relationships built up lent to a number of successes partnering with people or acting as a middleman when someone else had an idea and moving it forward.

I’m impressed with the volume growth of financial aid. About 11 years ago, we were doing $114 million, now we’re at $250 million, though unfortunately, mostly loans. The number of recipients climbed from 17,000 to over 22,000 even though enrollment has stayed largely stable. In that time, the percentage of people applying for and receiving financial assistance has gone up. Our staff size has not grown and our budget growth has been modest.

One other thing that’s notable is that we have over 44,000 aid applications every year. The reason that there are so many more applicants than recipients is that new freshmen and new graduate and professional students apply to a bunch of schools, see how much aid they’re offered and see how many they get admitted to. When you look at volume, that’s a lot of applications. I’m impressed that we’ve increased the volume without having problems in compliance or delivery.

Talking about great people, I’ve had a series of wonderful bosses. I have to say that. Just amazing. I used to think that the higher you went, there would be like a series of lazy golfers up there. Joe Corry used to head up the division, and my immediate boss, Wally Douma for all of 25 years until he retired. He’s still working for us — he’s like the star of SOAR.

WW: Are you guys going to partner for a song and dance act there?
Van Ess: Am I going to try to replace him there? No. He does a great job. I have no desire to carry on the SOAR torch. Later on Dick Barrows, now at CALS, brought forward a lot of total quality concepts [as our divisional leader].

WW: Do you ever hear from families who want express gratitude for the work the office does?
Van Ess: Like any other business, we probably hear more in terms of complaints than compliments, although a number of people do express gratitude. I rarely get compliments about myself; I do get kind words about staff members. We do get thank yous from different groups of students. We award scholarships and grant dollars, and we particularly hear from the merit scholarship recipients, typically entering freshmen whose parents taught them to send a thank-you note. We do get feedback from some low-income students who let us know what a difference financial aid made in their life.

WW: The fact there’s not an outcry of people who are unhappy with how financial aid works must also be satisfying.

Van Ess: When I started out here in the first couple years, the line at the start of the school year for our front desk, went down the front steps, down to Elvehjem, all the way, 30-40 feet beyond the start of the Elvehjem. It wasn’t a thin line. One time I was walking across the parking lot across the street — I knew I was going to spend the entire day interviewing students — one day I personally gave out 75 short-term loans, and that’s not all I did that day, gave them out like they were candy.

I’m walking across the lot and someone recognized me and they figured, why wait in line? So they started walking over to ask their question, and someone saw them talking to me, so they started trotting over and a couple others started running over. Before I knew it, I’m surrounded, like an unpopular Elvis in the lot. We’ve come a long way since these huge lines.

If you look down our hallways, there are these flip-up benches everywhere. That used to be for students to sit on because they used to have to sit on the floor, and the hallways were lined with hundreds of students. More recently, we changed our reception area and reduced the customer side of the counter because fewer people are now showing up in person. But we increased the back side of the counter for more telephone contacts. As a general level of service, it has absolutely improved, partly due to staff initiatives, partly due to technology. We’ve come a long way from those days with thousands of people coming in.

I did also want to mention that Gary Sandefur [now dean of the College of Letters and Science] was our boss briefly and hired me. That was one of the most exciting days of my life. For 10 years, Paul Barrows was a very good boss to me. And now, more recently, Joanne [Berg] who has been wonderful.

WW: Do you have a best memory or something that’s really striking?
Van Ess: I’ve been on campus a long time. I came here in 1968 and was one of the first employees of the Campus Assistance Center, back when it was a rumor control center, sharing a building with the Drug Information Center.

I met my wife here, our son graduated from a Madison high school, went to school here briefly about five years ago, didn’t like it, went to the Marine Corps, came out as a sergeant and now has been attending for the last year. He drops in on me all the time. I’ve got a lot of ties to campus. I’ve spent a lot of time here. I really like this place. I like the people, I like the buildings, I like the city and the parks.

I really enjoy being a part of this place.