When Shawn Cassiman got divorced, she knew it was time to go to college to be better able to support herself and her children.
A high school dropout with an equivalency diploma, she enrolled at UW-Superior at age 40. Commuting from Ashland, she worked at a pizza joint as well as work-study jobs between classes, before gaining her bachelor’s degree in 2002.
Now Cassiman has a master’s degree and is working toward a Ph.D. in social welfare at the UW-Madison. She says she was “lucky” to get scholarships and to find the mentors she needed to gain her degrees. But the University of Wisconsin System is launching a new Adult Student Initiative aimed at taking much of the luck out of the equation for older “nontraditional” students such as Cassiman.