Posted on 06/15/2009 8:36:00 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Bad times at home keep English teachers here
June 15, 2009
Alexis Cuperus, an American living in Korea, says she won’t be going home this year, and maybe not the next year either.
Teaching English in the city of Jinju, South Gyeongsang, Cuperus had planned to head back to school and seek her teacher licensure in Texas next March. But, like many expatriates here, fear of sinking into debt without a job to help dig her out have led her to re-evaluate.
“I’m definitely in the boat of many English teachers in South Korea,” she says.
As North America continues to bleed jobs, more English teachers are arriving in Korea and choosing to extend their stay in the country despite its weaker currency and perceived threats from its communist neighbor, market and official figures show.
Korea’s unrelenting fervor for English education has meant that positions for foreign teachers here are growing and relatively secure, even in the face of the nation’s own economic crisis.
The total number of people living in Korea on E-2 visas, issued to native-speaking English teachers, stood at 21,105 in March, according to data from Seoul’s Ministry of Justice - up more than 2,000 from the year before.
While there are no independent data on how many renew their contracts, interviews with recruiting agencies for teachers of English as a second language and teachers themselves revealed an upward trend.
Among her colleagues, Cuperus says she considers herself one of the lucky ones: She doesn’t have loans or a mortgage to pay off back in the U.S.
Korea’s currency had been among Asia’s strongest early last year, hovering near 990 won against the dollar in March 2008. But as the financial crisis deepened in winter, it plummeted to around 1,600 won. This meant some of Cuperus’s peers had to send home their entire paychecks to cover bills, subsisting in the following weeks on rice and kimchi.
“I wish I were exaggerating,” she says.
Even so, Footprints Recruiting, based in Vancouver, Canada, said it placed about 100 more teachers in Korea between September and February, the start of school here, compared with the same period the year before.
“We have definitely noticed a surge in applications recently,” says Ben Glickman, head of Footprints, which accepts applicants from the U.S. as well as Canada.
Glickman says he has not seen candidates being turned off by the poor exchange rate. “We project more placements this summer as well,” he adds.
A coordinator at Gone2Korea, another Canada-based recruiting agency, said there were few open positions at the popular Sogang Language Program campus in Ilsan, Gyeonggi, because most of the teachers there had re-signed their contracts.
Indeed, for teachers looking to return home, especially those hoping to stay in education, there are few prospects.
School districts in the U.S. from Seattle to New York City have either made staff cuts or placed hiring freezes on out-of-district applicants, shutting doors on new grads and experienced educators alike. While few if any public school teachers are likely to lose their jobs in Canada, new hiring will probably remain slow until government revenues improve, according to Penny Milton, CEO of the Canadian Education Association.
Some teachers here, however, seeking an alternative to earning income in
a dented currency (the Korean won now hovers near 1,250 won to the dollar) or having no job at all, are considering options in other countries.
Joel Kamphof, a 33-year-old Canadian, taught English in Ilsan in the early 2000s for two and a half years before a stint in the Netherlands. He came back to Korea in late 2007 but left in March this year, again bound for Europe.
“After Holland, I got married to my wife and decided Korea might be a good option to make some money,” Kamphof said. “But the won was simply not the same.”
Kamphof said that while many of his former colleagues had re-signed their contracts, a number of others talked of going to Taiwan, Japan or Thailand. “Korean hagwon,” he said, referring to private tutoring institutions, “are stepping stones to better things, and teachers know this.”
Not everyone is letting the economy affect their decisions. Sasha Friedman, who worked at a biofuels company in Portland, Oregon, prior to moving to Seoul with his girlfriend in January, said that despite the poor job market, he doubted the situation would stop them from returning home if they really wanted to.
“That said, it is a lot easier to make that decision when you have something lined up,” Friedman added. “I think the net effect of the economy is that we would start looking for something back home much longer before our contract normally ended.”
He said he does have a mortgage to pay back home, and that the local currency’s moderate gains in recent months have been a big help.
Yoon Jeung-hyun, Korea’s finance minister, has cautiously predicted the Korean economy will rebound faster than other countries, citing signs of stabilization in the currency and stock markets.
Whether he’s right remains to be seen. But for now, at least, it appears the U.S. economy’s own recovery is a long way off.
Cuperus, the American in Jinju, says that’s not all bad.
“I’m getting further away from pursuing my higher education goals,” she says, “but at the same time, [I am] getting more work experience and living rent-free in a beautiful country.”
By Ben Hancock Contributing writer [bghancock@gmail.com]
Ping!
Odd story in many ways.
hen I was in Korea (75-76) the Won was 5,000 to 1 USD. THings seem to have gotten better.
I do note the story fails to mention just that these English teachers get paid....odd, that. Yes?
Besides IIRC, teaching English in Japan is the better deal.
It wasn't beautiful when I lived there in holes in the ground in 1952, but it was rent-free.
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