Teacher Pay: Scott Sommers replies

Scott Sommers has replied to my comments on teacher pay on his blog here. I'd like to take a moment and talk about his presentation.

By 2005, the market for foreign English teachers in Taiwan had taken on a highly stratified appearance. At the bottom, of course, is the large number of entry-level jobs that require virtually no qualification. But there are now a wide variety of positions available in the market in terms of responsibilities and compensation.

This stratefication has always been the case.

These range from teaching full-time at a university with paid vacation time to positions with companies or with company teaching contractors that pay substantial hourly rates. The top teaching jobs now available are competitive with positions available in the ex-pat business community.

Teaching at a university is not a "top" teaching English job but an entirely different market and system. Substantial hourly rates are rarely available in mass quantity, and luck and connections, not qualifications, are generally the hiring basis for such jobs -- and such positions have always existed. There are no English teaching jobs competitive with positions available in the ex-pat business community. Which teaching jobs offer great retirement, stock options, housing, and education for one's children at a local International school? Let me know and I'll move into it right away!

The reality is that the pay differential is not all that great. Let's assume I am an instructor working 14 hours a week + four office hours + two other hours a week for meetings and other stuff. I work 20 hours a week and pull down 53K a month, base pay. Now, if I work 20 hours/wk at 600/hr in the cram school market, I make 48K a month, with far less preparation and no papers to grade. If we look at potential revenues the disparity is even greater -- If the cram schooler chooses to work more hours (the university instructor cannot so choose) he can rake in a lot more $$. The key difference with a university is being around adults who can think, and of course, access to amenities like the library and exercise equipment. The main thing about the Taiwan market is that it has no top -- as people who want English can source it from low-price bottom feeders, prices fall all over the market. There might be a few large companies with cushy English positions, but in the main Taiwan employers source their English teachers from the bottom of the market, like everyone else.

The situation of stagnant wages that Michael Turton describes is only true for the bottom portion of the market. The arrival of large numbers of South African English teachers, if it has had any affect at all, has made no difference at all among the highly skilled segment of culture workers.

There is no "highly skilled' segment of culture workers, and top end teacher pay has not budged either since I came in 1989. I focused on the bottom end simply because that's what the vast majority of people encounter. What is the pay of a "top end" teacher?

In fact, the market for foreign teachers has changed enormously since I arrived here in 1996. At that time, there were few legal employers outside of the major chain schools. The number of universities and colleges was much smaller than it is today, and it was extremely difficult to get a job at one without a PhD.

While it is true that the number of higher ed institutions has increased, it was very easy to get hired in the old days with just a masters, and I know many people that did. In fact, twenty years ago a BA was sufficient in many cases, there were so few native speakers here.

[Taiwan]