JoongAng Daily - Bad times at home keep English teachers here

JoongAng Daily - 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.