Financial Aid Encouragement
The following article first appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of the University of Portland's "Portland" magazine. While it recognizes only one individual among many great financial aid administrators who retire each year, we felt this story was universal in its appeal. For one thing, it does pay appropriate homage to Rita Lambert who retired as Director of Financial Aid from the University of Portland this spring, and we hope that it will serve to celebrate other financial aid professionals who have recently retired. But more than that, it acknowledges why those who work in financial aid do so, even as unsung heroes. This is an inspirational story and we hope that it will encourage each of you who labor in financial aid offices, surrounded by more work than it seems can ever be done, to keep on trying. It illustrates why none of us at the age of six said, "I want to grow up and work in the field of financial aid!" but why right now, we come to work each day. As you welcome a new class and are busy getting disbursements out, all the while worrying about when you'll have time to get the FISAP in, please remember that the work you do is important, it is appreciated, and it has a tremendously positive impact. And thank you for continuing to show up at work!

Rita
by Brian Doyle
Reprinted with permission from the Spring 2000 issue
of Portland Magazine, University of Portland,
5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland OR 97203.
bdoyle@up.edu

She remembers her father's thick black pencil, as fat around as a cigar. He was a lumber grader, in a sawmill in rural Silverton, Oregon, and his job was to gauge and discriminate, to judge and measure, and so does Edward Lambert's daughter, many years later, also gauge and deliberate, analyze and distinguish. But Rita Lambert's lumber is young men and women who wish to enter or desperately wish to remain at the University of Portland; and therein lies a tale.

From Silverton and its sawmill young Rita went to Mount Angel Academy, and there fell in with the Benedictines, priests and nuns sworn to the Rule of Saint Benedict-work is prayer-a rule she learned in part with long hours picking hops and beans and strawberries to pay her tuition bills. At age 18 she entered the Benedictine convent. At age 24 she took vows and a new name, and so arrived Sister Peter Mary at Saint Luke's school in rural Woodburn, where she taught math, science, literature, reading, social studies, football, basketball, and baseball. "It was impossible, and I loved it," she says.

Catholic nuns in the early 1960s were paid nothing and moved at the will of their superior, and soon at the will of her superior moved Sister Peter to the tiny timber town of Shaw, in the Cascade Mountains, where she taught math, science, literature, reading, social studies, softball, football, basketball, and baseball. And she was the principal, too, of Saint Mary's two-room schoolhouse with a pumphouse and occasionally a goat in the pumphouse for a joke at Sister Peter's expense. "It was again impossible, and again I loved it," she says.

Then suddenly Sister Peter was sent from Shaw to Chicago, to earn a graduate degree in philosophy, and she didn't love it. Chicago in 1968 was a tumult, riot police in the streets, bombs in train stations, and by then Sister Peter was wrestling with a momentous decision-whether to remain a nun. "I was becoming cynical, as the Church roiled, and I saw my fellow nuns becoming cynical, and I hated that," she says. "I had entered the convent very young, before I was really formed, and I needed something else in my life. It was a very intense time. I don't remember much from those months. But one morning I woke up and I was sure." Soon thereafter Sister Peter Mary was released from her vows by the Vatican, and so returned Rita Lambert to Oregon.

She worked for the state, at a house for troubled girls, and then at Oregon State University, in a dorm, and she earned a master's degree in Corvallis, and then she cast about for a job. Linn-Benton Community College, in rural Albany, needed an "academic counselor," and so came Rita Lambert to a school she would cherish for the next 15 years.

"Academic counselor, hah," she says. "We were desperate. The college itself was brand-new, a baby in the system, and we had nothing-no money, no offices, no equipment, nothing but energy. Our focus was basic education and job training for people who had never even dreamed of going to college. My first job was giving equivalency tests, from four in the afternoon to ten at night. People broke down in tears when they passed, people sobbed and ran out of the room when they failed. I never ceased to be amazed at their joy and despair. It made me furious that so much rode on that one test.

"I learned to listen there. I learned that you never know where the person in front of you has been that day. There were men and women who had never been out of their hometowns, who were intimidated by a college campus, who were extremely poor, who were teenagers raising children, who had survived horrors in Vietnam, who were surviving abusive relationships. They saw college as an incredibly faint chance at a better life, and my job was to help them grab at that chance."

Very soon Rita Lambert was the college's financial aid counselor, and soon after that she was the financial aid director, and for the next ten years she scratched and fought and shouted for money for her students - "sometimes so little money that it found its way out of my pockets into theirs, ten dollars here, twenty dollars there, money for food, for gas, for a book." But it was exhausting, and in 1985 Rita Lambert was out of emotional gas. "So much of my job was undoing students' antipathy toward offices and agencies, trying to instill hope and confidence in them, scrambling for state support of the college. I was tired, tired, tired."

But she loved the work, and she thought perhaps if she could do this work at a Catholic college, someplace that was spiritual and intellectual both, as Mount Angel had been for her and so, in 1985, came Rita Lambert to the University of Portland, in one of those rare perfectly timed matches of per-son and position. "My first job was to make students welcome in the office, which they weren't. We did that. My second job was to find enough money to keep the students we already had. We did that - I'd learned, at Linn-Benton, to poke the federal government for funds, which were there to be had if you could find them. My third job was much more difficult, and it meant politely ignoring the University's budget for financial aid. My predecessors had been convinced that the University budget was the law. But I believed that my job was to serve students and their families to the utmost of my ability. And I undertook to do that, and to report the cost of my effort to the University when I was done. I'm not irresponsible, and yes, it took a certain brass to spend money we hadn't planned to spend. But I was trusted, which is worth every-thing in a job, isn't it? I was trusted to do my job, and given the means to do it. And we changed things."

The biggest change was her invention of what has come to be called the Lambert Scale, a set of criteria by which prospective students were gauged - initially just for financial aid need, and then for admission as well. "When I came," says the inventor of the Scale, "deans had all the scholarship funds, and they awarded it by academic merit. But I kept seeing kids and families with terrific needs walking away because we couldn't help them. I proposed that we shift some money to need-based aid. The deans objected. They felt that allowing need in the equation would soon reduce the academic quality of enrolled students. I thought they were utterly wrong. So I was bound and determined to invent a set of parameters that measured students on both need and merit - something that would heavily weight academic performance and promise but would credit need, that would allow need to be a serious aspect of our decision. "We did that, and pretty soon the ad-missions office started using it as a scale to gauge applicants, and lo and behold, the academic quality of the freshman classes didn't go down - it went up, every year for the past eight years. And we still use a modified version of it for ad-missions and aid. So I feel vindicated. I feel that the University is more open to talented kids of any economic stripe, which is what we should be. "But we still scramble wildly for financial aid, and we don't have enough to go around. We lose great kids every year, every semester. There are so many stories. Kids who are desperate to come here, who know this is the school for them, who sit there in my office just crushed by the cold numbers. Parents who come to me alone, without their kid's knowledge, in a last-ditch effort to see what they can do. Grandparents who tell me they'll sell their house so their granddaughter can come here. The Vietnamese refugee whose mom is on welfare. The girl whose dad murdered her mother. Three enrolled students whose dad is terminally ill - how can they afford to stay here? The boy who first came to campus as a fourth-grader, to see a basketball game, who's been in love with the place ever since, but he lives in the projects, he's desperately poor, he's got $50 to his name. What can we do for him? The mother who borrows twice as much as her income to send her boy here, and when the tuition goes up 5 percent, what can she do? "The freedom to respond to their stories - that's everything. Imagine hearing these stories, from kids who are sitting there shaking with emotion, from mothers and fathers who are desperate to do the right thing by their child, and not being able to respond. It's real simple - the money we get from donors gives us the freedom to respond to these stories. Yes, we need to be trusted by the administration to make decisions, and yes, we need budget support, and yes, we need the support of the faculty. But most of all we need help from donors. Scholarships are best - scholarships are the secret slush funds of financial aid directors, the extra pool from which you draw to save kids you'd lose otherwise. Twice a day I walk down the hall and say 'okay, I need a thousand bucks for an education major from eastern Oregon, what do we have that fits."

"Look, at Linn-Benton, I helped students get into college, period. At the University of Portland I help them experience this university. There's a difference. To state legislators it's a matter of choice. I don't think so. There is a right college environment for every kid, and it's not necessarily the cheapest one. Trust me here - I've seen a lot of young people in this office for whom this university was absolutely the best place they could go to college, period, no question about it."

So why does a brilliant, articulate, passionate woman like Rita Lambert retire from a job she clearly loves?

There's a long pause.

"When I left the Benedictine order," she says slowly, "I was given $300 in severance pay. I took that money and I bought clothes to wear while I looked for a job so I could eat. Now I'm 60 years old and I've never owned a house and I want to own my own house. I want to go to Alaska and to Europe. I want to take a pottery class, and try tai-chi, and go camping in the Cascades. I want to fish for steelhead in the rain. I want to fish for chinook salmon in the ocean. I might have done this job for another five or six years, because I am not worn out by the stories, and I love this job, but I want to leave it while I can leave gracefully. I want to leave alive, with joy, with love. Do you understand?"

We understand.

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Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine. He is the author of Credo, a collection of essays about faith. He and his father Jim Doyle, are the authors of Two Voices, a collection of their essays, which won a Christopher Award and a Catholic Press Association Book Award.