The term "ESLer" as an insult?!

Plenty of people with 'useless' degrees manage to get great jobs. Arts majors go on to become lawyers, administrators, politicians, journalists, authors, managers, salespeople, and all sorts of white collar professions, so I don't think it's quite so fair. I think you'll find most of the people in white collar professions have arts degrees, and they do quite well.

More to the point though, you're absolutely right that most educated, trained workers make a similar wage or usually higher, but as for easy enough working hours and decent holidays? Not a fucking chance. Public school teachers are a fraction of the teachers here. Most work at kindy/elementary hagwons and they make shit money and the hours are horrible. They live in squalid conditions (compared to the average conditions of a similarly educated professional worker in Korea, OR in their home country), and they're continually abused and ripped off by their employers. The majority of teachers are here for a year or less and then leave, with an extremely negative view of Korean society (although they usually have a pretty positive view of everyday people from their interactions with them).

Almost all of your comments apply to the people who stay here for a while (like many in this thread) and those people are serious outliers. Some are sexpats, for sure, but I think most are as you say, unable to hold a real job at home (not for lack of qualifications, but due to mental issues like autism spectrum and such). Some probably like being in a position of someone for the first time in their lives, even if it is just children. Most Koreans never meet the majority of English teachers, since they stay for such a short time, never learn Korean, and barely interact with the locals. They meet the creeps, and they develop weird ideas about them.

/r/korea Thread Parent