Teachers’ Salaries in Korea
(Warning: If you want something that even vaguely resembles this post’s title, scroll down to the chart)
While studying Korean in my local Kyongsong/Pukyong Starbucks on Friday night, waiting for friends to finish dinner before we could meet up to go drinking (I’d already eaten), I was struck by the business of the place. Then I realised that PIFF started on Friday, and some movies were available at the new “Spark” cinema across the road (I guess). Despite living in Busan for 3 years I’ve never actually been, and with a baby daughter now I’m even less likely to in the future, but considering how much I went to and enjoyed film festivals as a dirt-poor student in Auckland 10 years ago then I find my present lack of enthusiasm for them now simply bizarre really. While pondering that I started feeling a little melancholy and just a tad old watching all the happy people 5-10 years younger than me sipping their lattes with their schedules and tickets in hand, which probably explains why I drank much more than normal with my friends a little later.
That meant I caught my wife and daughter’s flu, and with Typhoon Krosa outside to add to the melancholy on Sunday I had neither the inclination or physical strength to put this post up (and the next post which will go up tomorrow). Sorry. In the end I could did little more then try to reawaken my youthful film bug from its hibernation by catching up on downloaded movies…Clerks 2 didn’t help for feeling youthful, but was just perfect for someone with entirely too nostalgic memories of his student days in the mid-90s, and then, just like this review said, Sunshine was a potential classic, but with the abysmal last half-hour ruining it.
While I was watching that, the screen went very blurry on many occasions, which I can’t tell if it was deliberate or the result of bad focusing of the guy holding the camera at the cinema. After watching the Simpsons two weeks ago with someone’s head in the way for 30 minutes of it I’m getting a bit sick of the increasingly crappy quality of all the downloads I’ve been doing, and would be more than happy to pay for movies with decent quality. Can anybody recommend any sites? I could wait for DVDs to come out, but not only does Korea have harsh censorship laws but its censors are notorious for cutting non-trivial sections of movies out simply to make them shorter, often rendering the movies non-sensical in the process. Of course, TV is the worst: my wife used a Korean site to download Desperate Housewives, and realised that so much was cut out of them on TV that she decided to watch all of them again, starting with Season 1 (although I should point out that she’s quite happy to watch the same episode of Friends twice in one day, so it may not be that bad).
Still sick today, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do: I hate to use them, but in a work culture that frowns on sick days one must resort to using some amphetamines healthy cold medicine from the local pharmacy to be able to actually stand up to teach. Considering their increasing illegality in Western countries, Koreans’ attitudes to narcotics, and how little Koreans think at all about the contents of the medicines they take, a flaw not confined to Koreans of course but I’d argue definately the norm here, I’m always amazed at how when I’ll say to the pharmacist I have a cold and want some medicine, that they won’t bat an eyelid when I reject their first selection and demand ones with as much pseudoephedrine and/or ephedrine as possible, which they happily provide. Maybe they’re happy to do business with someone that knows his stuff for a change, or alternatively maybe they’re happy that I’m fulfilling their stereotypes of foreigners.
Anyway, that’s my life at the moment. As for those miserable peasants those of you who are merely interested in ESL teacher’s salaries in Korea, let me preempt your accusations of false advertising by pointing out that I never actually said “ESL,” I merely said “Teachers;” sorry, but if you want a newbie ESL teacher guide to Korea, you’re in the wrong place. Instead, today’s title comes from this graph from the Economist here because it neatly illustrates one of the points I made earlier about teaching being such a popular profession in Korea:
Teachers’ Salaries
Sep 27th 2007
How much do rich countries value their schoolteachers? Wages are the largest single cost in education. If earnings from teaching are high compared with average incomes, then claims about the lofty value placed on education may have some substance. A new report from the OECD provides a useful gauge, by calculating primary teachers’ pay relative to GDP per head. On this basis, teachers attract a premium over average incomes of around 25% in the OECD. Teaching in Turkey and South Korea has a very high status, with earnings more than double the average income per head. In Germany and Japan teachers are high up the pay scale, but they are somewhat less valued in Italy, France and America.
These statistics are not the result of teaching having a ”high status” in Korea; as I argued, teaching is such a popular profession in Korea because it is relatively meritocratic for women, and one of the few stable “jobs for life” remaining in Korea. But the Economist’s one-paragraph article can be forgiven for its soundbite, and actually I had no idea that wages for teaching were so relatively high here, although in hindsight 15 years of an uninterrupted career does lead to a lot of payrises for teacher that their counterparts on 2 year contracts in other professions lack, and so its still a consequence of the two features I mentioned. Having learned this though, when I get the chance I’m going to have to get detailed statistics for Korean professions as a whole, because if arguments I’ve made in earlier posts are also correct, then only civil servants and salarymen in chaebol get similarly high wages. Watch this space.
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[...] Teachers’ Salaries in Korea for DVDs to come out, but not only does Korea have harsh cencorship laws but its censors are notorious… miserable peasants those of you who are merely interested in ESL teacher s salaries in Korea, let me… said sorry, but if you want a newbie ESL teacher guide to Korea, you re in the wrong place. Instead… of the points I made earlier about teaching being such a popular profession in Korea: Teachers… and South Korea has a very high status, with earnings more than double the average income per head [...]
Korean teachers still generally consider themselves underpaid, however. Obviously I don’t have any direct experience with their paperwork load, but it’s always been described to me as pretty crushing.
I didn’t think that Korean teachers’ salaries were high either until I saw that graph. But as I type this I suddenly remember talking about this subject with a Korean friend a couple of years ago, who then was looking for a boyfriend/husband (she found one, and will get married next month!). She mentioned to me that Korean women are not particularly attracted to male hogwan teachers as they don’t make enough money, but teachers in the school system do, and have a lot more prestige too. I’ll ask her again next time I see her, and talk to a few more Korean friends as well and see what they think. But I don’t have any teacher friends unfortunately.
I’m a native korean and my mother has been a teacher in the Korean public school system for more than 20 years. Although I’m not too sure whether the metric used by the Economist carries much statistical validity, it did surprise me as a teacher is not generally considered to be a well compensated occupation in Korea. You would come to expect, if a teacher is the sole bread-winner for his/her family consisting of 3~4 members, that their family would be “getting by”, more likely to be feeling a bit of a pinch. On the other hand, it’s fairly often that you come across stories of people who earn outrageously large amounts of money being a hakwon teacher, but I am not too sure about their average figure as the pay can vary much. But I would say on the average that they earn more than their counterparts at public/private schools because I’ve seen cases where the latter migrate to the former for economic reasons. But hakwon teachers lack prestige (like you said) and their employment status is volatile. Also having to work late hours and weekends when kids are off from school and the pressure to perform wears you down so that its hard to keep going past your 30s. School teachers are generally held in high regard as part of the general mood toward public servants in Korea. Also seniority plays a very large factor in determining the salary for public servants, in my opinion which is a sign of inefficiency, and with a series of raises through the years my mother’s salary was quite higher than what I expected for the profession when I last asked.
Finally if you want broad statistics for salaries in Korea, this site might help. “http://job9.naver.com/pay/ ” It’s maintained by Naver, the biggest web site in Korea and has numbers for 1000 biggest companies, foreign companies, startup companies, public servants and etc. The numbers are collected by voluntary submission by people actually working there. Really nice if you can read Korean.
reply not working?
Hi Yoongu,
thanks, and sorry if there was a problem with the wordpress software: I’ve had to delete two duplicate replies of yours that came up at the same time!
I’d have to agree with you on just about everything you say, and especially on being unable to work in institutes past your 30s. I work in a branch of one of the biggest and most well-known institutes in Busan, with something like 10-15,000 students an evening going through its hallways every night in that branch alone, but whereas I only work there part-time the 80 or so other teachers and 20 or so management and administrative staff are there 6 days a week, on weekdays from about 11am to 1am. The pay is very high naturally, and the teachers don’t have classes for all that time of course, maybe only 4 or 5 a day in total, but in practice they have about 5 hours a day of monotonous photocopying and marking to do.
All this in a building constructed in 1989, last refurbished in 1995, and originally designed for about a third of the teachers and staff, which means no staffrooms and 2 or 3 meals a day eaten at teachers desks. I’d go crazy if I were them, and many do: there’s a turnover of about 10 teachers each month, I’ve given up remembering any of their names, and the oldest teachers would be in their early 40s and supervisors, with less teaching hours than normal. As for everyone else, I can’t imagine that they have anything like a normal family life, and as I type this I realise that because of this the fact that there are 3 to 1 male to female teachers should have come as no surprise to me at all. And there’s only one woman I know of there who’s over 35 too.
Back to the statistics, they were for 15 years of experience, which seems to confirm what your mother said.
Thanks for the link, and I’ll check it out soon.
Sir,
Two things come to mind:
1; Beat’s right about them being swamped with paperwork. Alongside that add more teaching hours per week, more days worked per year and the pressure to continue education during their vacation times, I’m sure they have reason to complain.
2; This graph makes it a little too easy to draw comparisons like that: What it really reflects is the overabundance of un- or underemployed people in this country. With service workers making around $3-4 per hour, its no wonder teachers are highly paid IN RELATION TO THEM!
good information,it seem like every other country has it right about how teacher effect
the education level of the people of it’s nation
ooooh yeah that mean they think alot about their people’s