The envelope sat on the kitchen counter for three days before I opened it. I knew what it was, of course—the offer letter from the university down the road. The position was financial aid counselor, a title that felt serious and grown-up, even compared to the eight years I’d spent teaching high school English. My daughter was doing homework at the table, and I remember glancing at her math worksheet while I pulled out the letter. The salary number was right there, middle of the page, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it.
It was more than my teaching salary. That’s the first thing I noticed. But Kansas City isn’t cheap, not anymore, and I’d been doing that math in my head since the interview. The financial aid office had seemed busy, almost hectic, with a line of students waiting outside the door even at 3 p.m. I’d spent twenty minutes talking with the director, who’d told me about the caseload and the verification season and the endless phone calls. She’d said, with a kind of tired honesty, that nobody gets into financial aid for the money.
That phrase stuck with me. I kept turning it over while I made dinner and while I drove my daughter to soccer practice. What does decent even mean for a job like that?
I thought about the families I’d known during my teaching years. The ones who’d ask me, sometimes shyly, whether I knew anything about FAFSA or scholarships. They’d sit at parent-teacher conferences and mention, almost as an aside, that they were worried about college costs. I remember one mother, a single mom who worked the night shift at the hospital, telling me she’d stared at the federal financial aid form for two weeks before she had the nerve to fill it out. It wasn’t that the form was confusing, exactly. It was that she was terrified of getting it wrong, of making some mistake that would cost her kid thousands of dollars.
That’s the real weight of the job. It’s not just processing forms and checking boxes. It’s the fact that every document you review is connected to a family sitting in their living room, holding their breath.
The offer was for $47,000 a year. When I’d looked up average salaries for financial aid specialists in the metro, the numbers ranged from $42,000 to $58,000, depending on experience. I had none—not directly, anyway. The director had liked that I could break down complex information for parents, that I was used to explaining things to people who were anxious and tired. A teaching background, I’d told her, is mostly about reading the room. Knowing when someone needs a slower explanation, when they need a call back, when they need you to say, “You’re not the first person to miss this deadline. It’s okay.”
I took the job. Not because the salary felt amazing, but because it felt survivable, and I knew the work mattered in a way that felt concrete. My daughter liked that I’d have summers off again, which I hadn’t realized was true until the director mentioned it. I’d be eligible for the state’s student loan forgiveness program after ten years, which was worth about $8,000 in annual terms. The health insurance was better than my school district’s. There was a bus pass arrangement and a 403(b) match and a parking spot that cost ten dollars a month, which downtown is practically a gift.
These are the things that never show up on an offer letter. I didn’t realize until later that they were the things that made the salary feel heavy or light.
The first month was chaos. Financial aid season started just as I was hired, which meant everything was due yesterday. A spreadsheet error discovered at noon meant I had to call nineteen students before evening to tell them their awards were being delayed. I remember sitting at my desk, phone against my ear, saying to one student, “I know this is stressful. Let’s walk through what we know right now.” She’d been this close to crying, but by the end of the call she’d apologized to me for apologizing. “No one’s yelled at me all day,” I told her. “You’re doing fine.”
There was a moment, around week three, when I nearly quit. An older couple came in, retirees, to check on their grandson’s award letter. They’d been paying for his tuition out of a fixed income, and there’d been a mix-up with his dependency status. The husband had spread paperwork across my desk—tax returns from three years, a Social Security benefits letter, pages and pages that I couldn’t really parse either. His hands were shaking slightly. I’d spent an hour on the phone with the federal processor, and the resolution was, essentially, “keep waiting.” The couple had left with a printed summary of next steps, and I remember thinking, that’s puny. That’s a stupid thing to hand someone’s grandparents.
But I kept coming back. The salary stayed the same. Nothing changed about the number. What changed was my definition of decent.
A few weeks ago, a woman from a neighboring department—work-study coordinator, a job that pays a few thousand less than mine—asked me the same question I’d asked myself. She’d been offered the position and was trying to make sense of the number. We were in the break room, and I was making tea, and I didn’t give her a straight answer. Instead, I asked her about her commuter. She said it would add forty minutes each way. I mentioned the remote flexibility, the fact that Fridays were lighter in summer, that the staff was surprisingly good about each other’s doctor appointments and school pickups.
I could see her weighing it. I hope she took the job. I hope she didn’t. I don’t actually know what she did, because she stopped coming to the break room after that week.
The salary for this line of work is never going to be the biggest number in a room. But it’s also not nothing. It’s a paycheck attached to a job where you can hand someone a revised award letter and watch their shoulders drop an inch. That moment, the physical release of tension when a family realizes they’ll be okay—I’ve seen it dozens of times now. It doesn’t pay the electric bill. But it makes a person think about what decent really requires, and whether the definition has to do entirely with the digit on the paper or partly with what you’re asked to carry, and what you’re given, in small and ordinary ways, to make it possible.
My daughter asked me the other night if I liked my job. She’s at the age where she’s starting to think about adult decisions. I told her I liked it more than I thought I would. She asked if that meant I’d do it forever. I laughed. “Probably not,” I said. “But it works for now.” That’s probably the closest I’ve come to an answer about the salary. It works for now. And that might be enough.
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