Financial News (Korean) reports that salaries for foreign English teachers are going through the roof as demand rises and hagwon experience difficulties finding qualified foreign teachers (by “qualified,” we mean with a four year degree — in anything — from a country where English is spoken as a native language).
According to hagwon, foreign English teachers currently make between 2 million and 3 million won a month. In the high season like summer vacation, however, they can make as high as 5 million won a month. If they’re scouted by another company, their price goes up still further. The hagwon pay for housing and airfare, too.
This means teachers are making 4 million—5 million won a month, with some making in excess of 8 million won a month.
Clearly, I left English teaching at the wrong time.
The costs, of course, will get dumped on the students. Some English kindergartens, for instance, are charging parents 1.8 million—2 million won a month. This hasn’t stopped parent from sending their kids there, though — some schools have waiting lists.
Now, let me ask — I’ve read a few stories about how teacher salaries are going to climb. Have any of you teachers out there actually seen a boost in salary, though?
{ 58 comments… read them below or add one }
5-8 million legally? I call more resentment-mongering bullshit by the media.
My salary has not gone up……
Admit it, price-gouging foreigner! You just put a down payment on a Lexus, didn’t you?! Didn’t you?!
If only! 5 Million a month!? I call Bullshit. probably closer to 3 ~ 3.5 (In my experience anyway. No Lexus in my future.)
1992 has returned.
That’s total bullshit on two counts: the English kindergartens (our kid goes to one) and the salaries of hagwon teachers (5-8 million won a month to work at a hagwon? As a former hagwon owner, I can assure you that the only hagwon teachers earning that much money are the Korean ‘celebrity hagwon teachers’ (some of which earn several hundred million won a year, as a matter of fact)).
Last year my co-worker told my students I made 5 million but I only made 4 mill. at an adult hagwon (all legal). The problem was I had recently been denied a raise because students complained about me. I think students expected more from me after the big mouth spewed his shyte. I complained and wondered how my name would be brought up and carried on during a lesson? That co-worker is now a program manager. I agree with ‘The Goat’
I work in a public youth center, that doesn’t charge exorbitant fees for classes. You would think with the shortage of teachers, there should be an overflow of students also. The new school year kicked off this week for kiddies and after-school programs, and I see no larger numbers of students coming in for level placement tests than I did last year.
No big salary increase here either. 15,0000 w extra/month starting this second year. Pretty standard.
#7,
You earn 4 million a month because your job involves a lot of one-on-one lessons/consultation-type classes, right? One thing for sure: you don’t have the typical hagwon job.
#7: tbone, your 4 million won, is that after taxes? How many hours?
The goat is right. That kind of money is almost impossible for a teacher to earn, they want a reason to resent foreign teachers. My goal is to get close to 5 million, but that’s a lot of work.
The Korean celebrity cram school stars probably make that and more, but most people don’t make anything near that.
Most of us F2er teacher types make between 3.5 and 5 million a month. Anymore than that and you’ll be seriously burnt out. I don’t work in a hagwon btw, and I don’t get flights or housing. I’d say it is almost impossible to make even 3.5 at a hagwon unless you’re very well connected.
Keith, How many hours to clear 4 million after taxes? I gots ta know!
25-28 classes of 50 minutes duration per week, a reasonable but fairly busy schedule. As I said though I don’t get housing or flights.
I just spoke with two Canadians who arrived in Korea this evening, fresh off the boat. They’d done the whole rigmarole: Degree double-checking, background checking and even an interview at the Korean Embassy in Montreal. Apparently, the interview involved a guy who “barely spoke English” asking them where they went to school, then checking on the school’s existence. Then it got weird. One girl was asked how many high schools there were on Prince Edward Island. She was also asked if she’d heard anything about teachers working in China and Japan, and what her feelings about Japan were. The other, who’s got a degree in Psychology, was asked to “Please psychoanalyze me [the Korean interviewer].”
My university salary hasn’t changed in four years. But I have more overtime, because the staff is awaiting a newly-minted E2′er held in the States for paperwork problems.
Bad administration never ceases!
No raise in 3 years and very unhappy about it.
All you have to do to satisfy your curiosity is go over to worknplay, eslcafe, eslteachersboard among others and look. It’s the same as always, nothing’s changed. They’re still showing full time work for two mil, they still have ads for “females only, 35 or younger”. I’m not making a cent more than I used to.
But I buy into it. I really do.
SMOE is offering 2 mill. for Master’s degree holders. Housing allowance, though, is W500,000.
Yes, it’s after taxes. 4 x 50 minute classes with children and then 2-4 hours with adults not far from the kiddy hagwon. I have to pay for my own housing which is a whopping 300,000 Won (plus bills = avg. 100.000 Won per month). I said that’s what I made last year, I’ve taken a rest since but am ready to get back at it next week.
Before deductions.. 2.9 million.. includes health/pension but not housing (up 100,000 from previous year).
3 hours a day.
3.5 weeks off in summer.
8 weeks off in winter.
5 million.. would only ‘legally’ be possible in hagwons with loaded hours me thinks… (well.. more than 3 a day anyway)
Illegally.. I hear it isn’t difficult at all to put away 5.
Oh wait.. I did forget about the extra summer pay.
(2.9 million for regular salary + 1.5 million for summer camp pay + 750,000 maximum in performance based bonuses).
Koehler, any teacher who’s rolling in dough will probably be too busy to surf the Marmot’s Hole. Also, the ones making 8 mil and up are clearly teaching illegally and probably wouldn’t be going around boasting their salaries on the internet (case in point, I’m not telling you jack squat about my wages
. So the survey here doesn’t exactly accurately represent the ESL community. Just sayin.
On a more philosophical point, I would like to interject here a random quote I came across today by Aristotle: “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.”
I know an F5er who makes a between 5 and 6 million a month, but he works hard for that cash. As for base pay, it really hasn’t gone up. Many universities are offering overtime, and that that will change the balance sheet, as will those who do side jobs will also see their balance go up too. An E2er can pull 3.5 to 4.5 working some long weeks.
The goat is right. This story is complete B.S.!
Just another “let’s kick up a stink about how the furriners are taking advantage of Korean people and raking in the dough” story!
Only one school in Busan that I know of the teachers salaries went up this year.
I work at the lowest paying university in all of Korea.
We haven’t had a raise in 4 years and probably won’t see one for a while. Every contract, we ask for a raise and they hem and haw about not having any money.
It’s an easy gig, though.
This is, of course, not a scientific survey. Nonetheless, there are many of us who work with a large cadre of coworkers (I count thirty), and they tell their tales as well.
The 2-3 million per month is, for most teachers, a base salary from a primary or sole bemployer. Anyone earning the five million won per month figure throughout the summer would be lucky indeed; these people would need to participate in two such extra programs during the summer to earn this income month-on-month. Such is possible, but only a few actually ever get the chance – or even want – to do this by lining up two or three extra programs back-to-back.
But that amount is made only throughout summer or winter, not year-round. In the past, this extra income was earned primarily by those who worked at university; nowadays, those on F-2-1 or above can also happily take part, no matter where they work. Regardless, the figure of eight million per month is not annual, but rather seasonal.
There are those who far more, but it is not related to increased regulation on the E-2. These people do so by having become owners of hagwons rather than employers of such, or else because they teach in violation of the law. While the former is an interesting market development, what is new about the latter?
The uni won’t give us a raise because they know that if we leave, they can easily replace us. We know that, too, so it does no good to threaten so.
Heck, for 5-8 Million a month I could almost afford to quit my Fortune 500 job and move over there…
For a younger person, it would be ideal… But the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet…
One more thing to add here…I think this kind of article will prove to be quite convenient for hagwon owners. They can “justify” the increased monthly charges by blaming the evil greedy foreigner. All the while, they increase their own profit with no negative repercussions from the parents (or attendees if not a kids institute).
Fucking fantastic turn of events for the owners.
Just finished Jan-Feb kids hagwon program at 5 mill a month. It exists, fellows.
One sweet three-evenings-plus-Sat-afternoon gig at 2.7 (visa job); corporate stuff three mornings a week at 2.2; private student tutoring in linguistics two or three afternoons of high-level-ish stuff per week at about 2.0 – it’s doable, but it’s tough to get the visa job that’ll give you enough time off to get the other gigs. And all three of those jobs were obtained through personal contacts – THAT’S how you get the good stuff. Of course two out of three of those jobs were totally illegal but frankly, how often have you heard of a teacher getting busted for privates where there wasn’t some other agenda on the part of the informer?
Best of all worlds – organize your own “camp” with a couple of like-minded buddies. Then your main worry is how to get all the cash back to your home country. And yes, you can do this and still teach quality lessons.
#20,
You’d be surprised how much this English teacher earns thanks to sound investements.
Besides, Brendon probably works longer hours than any hagwon teacher and he still finds time to leave comments.
Wow, I should pack up and go back to motherland and open up new Hagwon. If these teachers earn 5 mil/mo how much Hagwon owner would make?
You won’t find a 5 mil job without developing contacts.
You can’t find a job 4+ mil? Means no one knows you. People really should treat it as a business.
From my experience a lot, not all, are socially retarded. They have no idea how to network themselves inside the industry. They just walk around and hope for the best.
I was typing too fast, and didn’t check #23 before posting. The last paragraph might be confusing, and should read
‘There are those who earn far more, but that’s not related to increased regulation on the E-2. These people do so by having become owners of hagwons rather than employees of such, or else because they teach in violation of the law. While the former is an interesting market development, what is new about the latter?’
I have a friend with a master’s in Applied Linguistics working at a Korean university for 3.6 million a month for a 16-hour week. That is after the raise he just got this year. I think their overtime pay is 35,000 won an hour, and if he teaches during the vacations, he gets 50,000 won an hour. His apartment is subsidized for a small amount. His job is the best paying Korean university job I’ve heard of for a foreign teacher with a master’s degree.
Once you are hired as a teacher in Korea, it is usually quite difficult to get a raise, so you need to negotiate a good contract in the beginning.
By the way, if foreign teachers cooperated a little, they could raise their salaries in Korea by using a simple economic concept.
Create a list of the top 100 (or 200 or 500) Korean schools in terms of salary and benefits. After the list is known, perspective teachers will obviously apply to the schools higher on the list, which will cause the schools to compete for a higher place on the list to get a better pick of qualified teachers. Korean students wanting to learn from the better qualified teachers will pay more money to study at the schools higher on the list, which would be more incentive for the schools on the list to raise their salaries to get placed higher and get the better qualified teachers. Isn’t that how it works?
@#32:
There are threads comparing working conditions and remuneration at various universities. Cheju National and others notorious for paying less than 2 million for 20+ teaching hours and required vacation teaching know what it takes to attract qualified teachers. They just aren’t willing to meet those expectations.
gbevers, your friend should be included on the university’s pension scheme. And, if it were made through a private pension fund, your friend’s pension could very well outperform the national pension scheme down the road. That would be an additional sweetener to your friend’s already good package.
I agree with exexpatPete’s formula:
A visa job, ideally in the afternoon, with fixed hours PLUS company classes and private student tutoring, which you find on your own, in the mornings and evenings.
What you need to do:
1. wear a suit (eliminates half your competition right there).
2. get business cards.
3. smile and say “hi” to anyone who looks like a good contact.
4. know the bus and subway systems.
5. learn to turn down work that isn’t convenient for you and doesn’t pay enough. “No, I don’t want to walk 20 minutes or take a 마을 버스 from a far-flung subway station to your old apartment building to teach your little one for W40,000/hr. However, I will consider W100,000 for 1-1/2 hours if we can do it at …” One feels joy when an offer like that is accepted. When the offer is rejected, I also like the shocked silence on the other end of the line just after I propose the rate.
The challenges you will face:
1. At night, it’s hard to find quiet coffee shops in which to teach. Avoid 강남, 압구정, and the like, and stear clear of the coffee chains where 닭살 커플들 can distract you. Find older coffee shops near unfashionable subway stations. 봉천역 is my best example.
2. Company classes can be hit-and-miss. At the worst, the students treat signing up for the class as their main achievement, and consider attendance and punctuality to be optional. You’ll get 2 of 5 students showing up, both late. Everyone’s “very busy,” of course.
Along with posters above, I agree that making 5 million/month is seasonal and that it is hard to make that much year-round. I find summer, when company workers are on vacations at crowded beaches, to be the slow season.
Brendon works long hours but they are by no means regular. Up at 0700 and on the phone or answering e-mail, telephone conferences at midnight and 1:00 a.m. — Saturdays and Sundays too. All told, in a week there are 60-70 hours I’m “on call” for the benefit of clients and to keep projects moving. But not all of it is billable (sometimes, alas, it is all billable time — those weeks are real grinds). In some of the dead time I read blogs. After all, it’s not like I can dash out to a movie or a ballgame or anything.
In a sense, it’s a lot like English teaching. There’s a lot in common with the hustling teacher, running off to morning classes at oh-dark-thirty, shuttling from Seoul to Suwon on the bus, eating from a streetcart in order to dash into a night class — we’re both service workers driven by client demands. Except that my work is done with little need to move around, hence the appearance of more “free” time.
If you can find a hagwon job that does not have split shifts (and trust me, they do exist, actually in larger numbers than you might think) then you can easily find the time to do other gigs, whether they are in the morning or in the evening. Also, there are some hagwons that provide annual salary raises, most of these are the large international hagwons that have institutes around the world. Grant it, the raises are not over the rainbow, but they are raises nonetheless. So, it is not at all difficult to earn 5-6 million KRW per month if you are willing to work say 6:30am to 9pm at night. Long day, but if you want (or need) money that bad, you can do it. I also agree that a lot of the people who can’t make that money are social morons who treat teaching over here as some part-time half-ass job. They don’t dress for success, they don’t form close relationships with their students (not that kind, perverts), and they often don’t really care if their students improve or not. Just my two cents….which in the grand scheme of things means nothing.
Stacked, you’re right. It’s nice that you put, “a lot, not all”. I am socially retarded. My business and networking acumen is such that I am here in Korea teaching some woman’s spoiled munger when I should already have made my million and retired. Whether I am making two mil or eight mil a month, somewhere along the line my retardation got the best of me. It’s not possible that I’d rather be at home with my wife and daughter than out shmoozing would be clients.
One thing I can assure you, the abilities you say are available to you today are not that much grander than the situation of any person with equal experience and connections five years ago. Things have not changed to an eye-bugging degree.
It’s amazing how thoroughly you are able to encompass so many of us here with a simple two word phrase, we being complete strangers on the internet and all. With those kinds of social skills and such a penetrating and insightful vision, I can only imagine the criticism you reveal to those you know. You must have a lot of friends.
When those hagwons that offered two mil a month five years ago get so few responses that they quit offering two mil a month, then I’ll know things have changed.
Not to mention getting crazy laid.
“Just finished Jan-Feb kids hagwon program at 5 mill a month. It exists, fellows.”
Camps are a different monster.
Down in Anseong, things haven’t changed. Though I do admit I like to look longingly at the job postings at Dave’s, and dream… Actually, most of the offers there seem stable.
@Maddlew,
My comments were never aimed at everyone nor was I generalizing. It was aimed at someone specific.
But it sounds like I described you and you got really offended.
I’ve seen alot of the English teachers that come here. I’ve met some good folks, but most of them are complete losers. They look and act like losers.
They come here looking for a new chance and then BAM they get hit with the reality that it doesn’t matter where they are. This pretty much sums up my experience with a vast majority of teachers here.
Just analyze Robert Koehler’s articles on his web site. Generally a writer caters to his audience and his articles reek of anger with subtle misery.
I’ll let you ponder that statement.
Seems as if your psychoanalytical skills are as good as your Korean comprehension skills:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/03/06/jjambbong-couple-makes-good/#comment-139597
“Just finished Jan-Feb kids hagwon program at 5 mill a month. It exists, fellows.”
Yeah, it does exist… in some nightmares I’ve had.
The phrase that hit me was “socially retarded”. I think you were using the word “socially” in a very narrow context, specifically the utilization of contacts made in a social setting in order to find financial benefit.
You’ve got to understand that to some people a social setting is more real and not an environment to take advantage of. If I talk to someone I try to engage them as a potential friend and not potential fountainhead of wealth. To me and some others to do otherwise is akin to prostitution.
Now this is of course putting the situation into somewhat stark terms. In an ideal situation why can’t we have both, n’est-ce pas? Maybe what I’m trying to say is the endless self-promotion just gets extremely wearisome after awhile. Perhaps at your age it’s new and exciting and easy and the prospect of the potential for financial gain creates a buzz. For me mixing money with friendship tends to taint everything. People I meet who are into that sort of self-gloss start sounding like Bob Barker.
Maddlew’s obviously been to one or two chamber of commerce cocktails.
@49, funny hearing you say that when you apparently don’t know your own audience.
Your readers are generally bitter. It’s pretty obvious without the analysis.
Maybe you should brush up on your Korean skills? I’ve read the comments and they are general bashing.
Of course given the level of insecurity and misery shown by you and your readers I’m not surprised that it turned into some insecurity thing.
Koreans in Korea don’t like Americans? Goddamn they must be insecure. Sorry they just hate you, much like most of the world.
Wow! Stacked, you can run that sort of smack at some of the bittermen who post here, you can even run it at me and occasionally hit on a morsel of truth, but run it on the Marmot and I think you’re confusing him with another species of varmint.
“Your readers are generally bitter. Its pretty obvious without the analysis.”
If this statement is indeed true, it looks like you will fit in just fine.
Nothing major on my end – dam Direct English is on every corner nowadays.
I have never taught English — thank God! — and my last teaching gig ended 11 years ago, and the last time I taught in a hagwon I had lots of hair, so my outlook on this is probably skewed.
Back when I taught in a university specialized in pretending to teach foreign languages, first-year recruitees made 2.something million, like their Korean counterparts, and were, supposedly, given raises just the same as the rest of the faculty. You stuck around long enough, you get “fat” [we're talking the 90s here] salaries of 5.5 milion and up, plus free housing. And if you were a boot-licker, you could get part of your compulsory 14 hours of teaching — and your more or less compulsory overtime hours — transferred to one of the gravy trains: the Interpretation Institute, or one of the crash course programmes the uni was running for private companies.
The problem was to be able to stay long enough [which was not my goal anyway, as I was only using this job to get my finances back in order...]. One policy that was passed while I was there was that people would be replaced every three years, in order to “control expenses”. Since the replacements would start at the entry-level salary. Another was that the foreigners should have a PhD, or at least be registered in a PhD programme. Some long-timers were let go over that, too. Of course there were “exceptions”. I saw a new hiree that got into this school being accepted directly into the pay grade of a 3-year veteran because she had been teaching for three years in another uni, and the French guy who had more or less life and death power over his fellow French colleagues had said to the management that she was a good teacher. And she got past the 3-year limit rule.
I have no idea — and don’t really care to know — how much they get paid there today at entry level, but it can’t be less than 3 milion, which isn’t much anyway…
I enjoy giving students of a lower socio-economic background a wider view of the world and a chance at a better education. I really don’t care how much I could make. To be honest a lot of the other people who have posted here are the ones that are giving people like me an unjust reputation. There are a lot of people who are here for a sea-change and aren’t gouging parents for too much money in a country where the locals get payed sweet f.a.
I am happy for people to be payed what they are worth. Are you sure you are worth what they are paying you ?
p.s. I also think the media here is sensationalist ratings grabbing rubbish, and so do a lot of Koreans(from those I have spoken to). We do get payed a bit more than they do generally, and I think that most Koreans know that but I don’t think that they are all taken in by the hype.
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