Nearly twenty years ago, I came to Korea to teach English at an after-school academy. As a starting teacher, I got 2.1 million won a month and a place to live. Astonishingly, this is still exactly what new teachers get. The exchange rate has hardly budged for decades, always hovering around 1100 won per dollar, which amounts to about $1900 a month, or $23,000 a year. What has changed is how much those dollars are worth in real terms, and also how much everyone else in Korea is earning.
Inflation and GDP
Let’s look at inflation first. If hagwon salaries kept up with inflation, the starting rate would be about 3.1 million (about $2850 a month, or $34,000 a year) — not exactly riches, but above the median personal income in the United States. (US and Korean inflation have tracked closely, so the same is roughly true in dollar terms.) Throw in the free housing, and you’ve got a salary that was close to what dot-coms were handing out in those years to inexperienced college grads, and something well above what you could get starting out in publishing (these are the fields I poked around in, so it’s what I know about).
But in terms of wealth and what it feels like, a huge factor is how much you’re making compared to people around you. And that’s where things have changed most drastically for English teachers in Korea.
In 2001, the per capita GDP in Korea was $11,561 (2001 dollars). As an English teacher, you were making nearly double the per capita GDP, and you didn’t have housing expenses. This didn’t make you rich exactly, but it was enough money that you could afford luxuries many people couldn’t while still saving money.
In 2019, the per capita GDP had soared to $30,644. A hagwon salary is now around 75% of per capita GDP. Again, with the free housing, it’s not nothing. And inflation hasn’t kept up with the rising incomes, so what exactly does this mean in real terms?
Korean business have, of course, found ways to help people part with their greater wealth. In 2001, no one had a smartphone or a 40-inch flat-screen TV. Starbucks and the many homegrown Korean equivalents weren’t yet ubiquitous. There’s been a huge expansion in the available fashion, cosmetics, entertainment, cuisine. More Koreans have cars, and they’re nicer cars. More Koreans have foreign sneakers. More Koreans drink foreign beer, or drink wine. More Koreans travel abroad. Korea’s housing stock has improved, so a lot of people live in places that are nicer than a teacher’s one-room. A typical date costs more. And teachers are lower on the economic ladder than they once were.
Why salaries haven’t budged
So here’s where I’m gonna get into some conjecture, but if I had to guess why salaries haven’t changed in decades — why they have, in real terms, declined — I would give three reasons: Korea’s more appealing than it was, living abroad is more popular than it was for Westerners, and Korean demographics are changing.
The Korea of 2021 is not the Korea of 2001. When I first came here, there was no Korean wave. Winter Sonata was in the future. Bong Joon-ho had made just one movie, and it was a flop. Kpop was low-budget and derivative. Japan was cool, and China was the future, and Korea was nondescript. No one in the US knew about Korean culture. I remember going to a kimchi expo at COEX in Seoul back in 2002, where kimchi producers were declaring their plans to make fermented cabbage a global food. It seemed naive and a little sad. I would not have guessed that twenty years later, suburban Americans would be buying jars of the stuff at the local H Mart. Back then, my head would whip around when I spotted another Westerner because there weren’t many of us. To quote Monty Python, Korea felt like “a close second to Belgium when going abroad.”
At the same time, living abroad has become far more appealing that it was. Stagnant economies in North America and Europe are the push, but it’s the pull that has changed dramatically. These days (well, pre-pandemic, anyway), you can land in country not speaking the language and do most of what you need with a smartphone: book a hotel, hail a taxi, navigate public transit, even translate a menu. You can also message and video chat with the folks back home. Dating and social apps make it easy to meet locals and other expats and to find social events. None of this was easily available twenty years ago. I had to go across the street to the PC room just to check my email. To be an expat then was to be isolated in a way that’s barely imaginable today. Living abroad is just way, way easier than it was.
Meanwhile, Korea has had a low birth rate for years. The 0-14 population was 9.2 million in 2006 and 5.5 million in 2020. There are half as many kids, which doesn’t exactly translate to half as many teaching jobs — increased wealth can mean smaller class sizes and a higher percentage of kids in after-school academies — but it does suggest a declining number of teaching positions.
Thoughts for the future
It’s hard to know what the shape of the world will be after the pandemic is over, but it seems likely that people will again want to travel and live abroad, and that Korea’s social capital will be at least as strong as it was in 2019. And Korea’s economy has held up relatively well. Meanwhile, Korea’s demographic decline has only deepened.
Without new laws or a change in demand, the long, slow decline in teaching salaries should continue. Will the pandemic engender a shift to remote learning? I’m guessing parents will still want personal exposure to real, live foreigners. What might change is the reliance on inexperienced, largely unqualified teachers. As Koreans get wealthier, they may begin to demand a greater level of professionalism from their English teachers: a teaching degree, perhaps, or at least a certification.
But for now, it’s still 2.1 million and a one-room for any college graduate from the right countries. That’s just not quite the deal it once was.
Also published on Medium.