A year ago, Arianna Marie, 25, was struggling to control the students in her Florida elementary school classroom. She was living with her parents to save on rent and quickly feeling her passion for teaching dry up, even though it was her first job since graduation. Through an English-language teaching job in South Korea, Marie is now living in Daegu, a city in the south-eastern part of the country, with enough pay and benefits that she can save and travel.
The fact that it’s the home to K-pop and K-dramas doesn’t hurt – and in a striking shift, she’s rediscovered her love for the job. Benefits include free housing, flight reimbursements, healthcare and monthly salaries starting at about $1,400. Graduating with a college degree in the US no longer comes with the stability it once guaranteed.
Since the Covid pandemic, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has been higher than the overall unemployment rate. For those who have a job, earnings have been rising slower than the pace of inflation. New entrants in US public service jobs like teaching are increasingly leaving the profession, citing low pay and high stress.
Other countries, including Japan and Taiwan, are similarly investing in full-time English-language teachers, attracting young workers with benefits they would be hard-pressed to find in their home countries. Gen Z is spreading the word. Some English-language teachers have garnered thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, showing audiences their lives abroad.
Marie has been keeping track of her travels, and documenting some of her classroom experiences, on her Instagram account. The TEFL Institute, which issues TEFL certification courses that accredit English-language teachers, notes that the English-language teaching market was valued at $95bn in 2026, with more than 2m TEFL jobs available worldwide. The market is expected to reach $181bn by 2034, and the Asia-Pacific region is growing the fastest.
As the US federal government has gutted the Department of Education, American public school teachers, who are overwhelmingly female, are especially feeling the pull to overseas jobs. But the phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Americans, or teachers. Zwiwe Dlamini, 28, was spiraling into a deep depression working as an administrative assistant in Durban, South Africa.
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