I worked as an English instructor in Japan for 6 years before I moved on to a different profession . Before that though I always considered teaching at a university as one of the best levels a teacher could reach. I was never qualified enough because I never went for a masters. My questions are:
1) Is it really as great as it seems?
2) I’ve seen the salary of some open positions and heard from professors that it’s pretty dang high. This question seems a bit rude but do you feel you deserve the high salary for the job you do?
I ask because one time when I worked as an ALT the starting salary was high yet I did absolutely nothing. So I couldn’t help but feel that those funds could have been spent elsewhere. So I always wondered if working at a university was the same.
I apologize if this offends some people. My curiosity to ask this question got the best of me.
Sincerely, a curious dude.
14 comments
1.) It really depends. For some people it is great, for others it isn’t. You generally have to be pretty good at self-discipline and be OK having one year contracts renewable up to 5 years, then you have to find a new school to work at. This is generally what most people have for full-time. However, you can get some bad schools/departments and bad classes that make the job not very enjoyable.
2.) You get a lot of time off during the breaks but when you are working you are usually pretty busy. Especially if you combine research and publishing on top of this. If you teach 10 classes a week, that is 15 hours in class + hours preparing + hours checking work + possible department meetings + office hours + writing/researching. You have to remember you need to make yourself marketable for future positions too since very few people get tenure.
Often you may be responsible for your own syllabus, grading, etc. Like all jobs, there are people who coast through. I wouldn’t say the pay is particularly high. Usually, full-time contract positions are about 5mil yen. However, it can be quite comfortable depending on your lifestyle. What other jobs requiring a masters pay less than that?
How good teaching at a university is depends entirely upon the individual and the university in question. Some are glorified ALT positions. Others are real faculty positions that come with research allowances and real perks.
These days, though, across the board, most universities are moving to the adjunct system. They hire a bunch of part time unbenefited instructors on year or term long contracts to teach the classes. The pay is okay, but it is part time work. You would have to work at multiple universities to make ends meet, if you could even get multiple to hire you. Otherwise, you’d need to supplement your income with eikaiwa or other side work.
1. Great in what way? I enjoy it but can you be more specific?
2. I think I deserve my salary because I do actually work from 9-5. Outside of classes there is prep, grading, and other responsibilities, plus I usually have to work on research during breaks. Plus, I had to pay for grad school so I need the money to pay off those loans. Also having gone to grad school means I am more knowledgeable than an ALT or anyone else without a masters, which makes me a better teacher.
A common teaching load is 5 or 6 classes, two or so committees, entrance exam work, open college days (weekends), research and service to the associations you join, refereeing papers, student guidance, and division and department meetings. Apart from the administrative duties I would put in 50 to 60 hours a week easily, more if I had an experiment or research project underway. Taught a PhD class at another university as a favor. Never thought about the hours because I enjoy what I do and would not give it up. Tenured since day one. Paid very well since day one.
>I ask because one time when I worked as an ALT the starting salary was high
Were you JET or quite a while ago? Otherwise its fairly rare for ALT salary to be anything approaching “high”. (Well, actually, what do you consider high.)
>yet I did absolutely nothing.
Well, what were you asked to do? How many schools were you at? What kind of things did you try to proactively do?
As if often said, every school is different, but I’m always slightly surprised by people who literally had nothing to do…
1) Depends on what you mean by “great”.
2) Yes, absolutely. I put in the time and effort to get a master’s degree and research and publish as much as I can. I highly doubt people in IT or finance are reading research journals and contributing to their field in the same way. Besides that, the job is fuckin hard. I usually teach 10 koma. At an average of 20 students, I teach 200 students, each of whom has their own deficiencies in the language and I do my best to work with them on an individual basis and give them the attention that they need and pay for through their tuition.
In my experience, as far as the actual teaching goes, it’s easier to teach at university than at an *eikaiwa* (which is the only other experience I have in teaching). At *eikaiwa*, you may be teaching the same people for years on end—at an *eikaiwa* where I was head teacher for six years I taught students who’d been there for 10 years already and who may well still be there, for all I know—so you have to continually come up with new materials or ways to approach materials. As a university teacher, on the other hand, you’re usually teaching the same classes again and again with different students, which means you can not only recycle a lot, but also refine your materials, approaches, and so on semester by semester or year by year.
On the other hand, the parts of the work that are not actual interaction with students take a lot of time. My rough estimate is at least two clock hours of preparation, grading, paperwork and the like are necessary for each hour in the classroom.
Besides that, as u/Prof_PTokyo mentions and u/tsian and u/swordtech intimate, the teaching/classroom aspect of the job is only part of it and is, traditionally, the least onerous and least important part. Research, committee work, mentoring, and the like entail more and different work. u/Prof_PTokyo mentions 50-60 hours per week, but in my experience that’s on the low end, at least for younger academics who are not temporary adjunct workers.
The limited-time adjunct workers that u/notadialect seems to have in mind in many places have less of a burden, but the work required does not automatically lead to similar positions or an effective tenure track and can be, if not exactly a dead end, at least part of a treadmill on which you’re continually running toward the next limited-term contract that’s no better than your present one.
As for salaries, they’re usually on the low end of livable if you want to do things like have a family until you manage to move up in academic ranks. Salaries also vary by university (with the most prestigious ones not necessarily having the highest compensation).
>great in the sense that you feel a sense of fulfillment from you job. Your students and coworkers , even though they may not be perfect, treat one another with respect and courtesy. It’s a bit abstract but this is what I kinda mean.
Responding to your specifics OP. As a young-ish university lecturer teaching academic writing and English discussion courses, I’d say the job is extremely fulfilling. I have the respect of students and co-workers, and the atmosphere is generally great. Going to work every morning is an absolute pleasure and the spring/fall holidays allow me to pursue my research interests and build my resume for future positions. This, of course, depends on the perspective, expectations, and contract you have.
To be specific, I make about 5.5 mil a year on a fixed-term standard 3-5 year contract (which is coming to an end soon) and I have had opportunities to improve my courses and teaching methods, attending conferences on a variety of disciplines including linguistics, syllabus and rubric design, curriculum development, positive psychology, I/O psychology, and applied linguistics. It’s been a lot of fun getting into publishing my work, replicating studies, and learning to be patient while I work with other academics on papers. I still have a lot to improve upon, but it is pretty good. I’m required on campus about 30-35 hours a week, but end up doing more on most days.
The job gives a ton of opportunities to be part of the university through creating my own research/academic projects and joining student-run clubs and organizations where I’ve felt I can offer my expertise. All the while, I’m making an effort to use my Japanese skills wherever I can, but that can be tough at times. At the end of the day, the students are what keep me in it. I’ve had the chance to see them grow over the years. It’s amazing how people develop.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not always blindly positive about things, and there are frustrations at times. It can be very easy to slip into a sense of negativity about the job, much like any position. I have seen some teachers do the absolute bare minimum for 4-5 years in their position, never venturing outside of what is explicitly stated in their contracts (no publishing, no involvement outside of teaching their own classes, not creating their own programs, or contributing to already established ones, disinterest in working with other teachers). To each their own, but it is no mystery to me why they are now having difficulty finding jobs.
And, in response to this:
>do you feel you deserve the high salary for the job you do?
When I first started and throughout my first year, I did the bare minimum as a lecturer. I showed up for classes and nothing else unless it was explicitly stated in my contract. I was pretty negative and prickly about being respected for the job that I do. To be honest, I didn’t deserve my salary.
However, once I got past that and started to establish myself, gain experience, take on projects and publications, I felt a lot more fulfilled and (A LOT) busier. However, I can say with all honesty I deserve my salary, and I think 5.5 mil is about right for where I am at in my career when competitively compared with others at my age.
Check this out: [The Tragedy of the Part-Time Lecturer: Poverty on the Rise Among Japan’s PhDs](https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00721/)
I taught three lessons a semester for two years and didn’t renew. The pay was solid, but not amazing for the work I was putting in. I had Monday/Tuesday classes, and most students submitted homework at the very last moment. I found myself doing a lot of work on Sundays some weeks. Not every week, but enough that I dreaded it. It made the pay less appealing. Four months of the year there were no classes, and I still got my monthly salary though.
More importantly, as a part time teacher, I was given less desirable classes. All of my classes were mandatory for students, and a lot of kids couldn’t be bothered to pretend they cared. I spend time giving students personalized feedback on writing three times a semester, and 25% of them used it, the rest just ignored it. But giving feedback was part of good teaching, so I had to do it. Students did presentations where they couldn’t pronounce the words, and it seemed like they were reading them aloud for the first time. It was incredibly frustrating to be part of. I wanted to chastise them like children, but I didn’t think they’d get it. I’d just get some hollow, 申し訳ありません！back from them.
All in all, it felt a lot like teaching junior high school. I used a pre-2nd EIKEN-level text the first year, assuming university students would at the very least be at that level, but it was way beyond so many kids that I went down a level to 3rd EIKEN the second year. It was easy for some students, other students still couldn’t be bothered.
It was one of the least satisfying teaching experiences I’ve had in 20 years, and I was only doing it for money. I initially agreed to a third year, then after some introspection, backed out a week later.
I think if you are in the center of the school, and your students want to take your course, it would be very rewarding. As a part-timer teaching a mandatory class, I felt more like a babysitter than anything else.
>1) Is it really as great as it seems?
Depends on the job, because there are a huge range of Japanese “universities”. Some of them are on the level of decent universities in other advanced nations and you could have a good set up. But then there are “F rank” universities full of people that would never go on to college in the West, and it’s basically just glorified high school classes with kids that either sleep or constantly asked to go to the bathroom, and you can’t really fail them because it could hurt the schools finances. I know people that have started working at places like that, and they feel like they are on the same basic treadmill they were when they taught high school, albeit it with somewhat better pay and longer vacations.
>2) I’ve seen the salary of some open positions and heard from professors that it’s pretty dang high. This question seems a bit rude but do you feel you deserve the high salary for the job you do?
You’re asking the wrong question. The real question is, do most people deserve the low salaries they get for the job they do? Most English teaching jobs here pay much less than they did in the past, despite inflation getting worse. Why knock the few that still pay OK?
To get a contract university job, you typically need a masters degree. That can run you anywhere from ¥1 million-¥3 million, depending on how much your home country subsidizes it. You also typically need three publications. Even if you’re not getting published in nature, that’s still more effort than your average ALT. To get tenure, you’ll typically need a PhD (can easily run you three to five million yen), a good grip on Japanese (N2 at a bare minimum), and decently long list of decent publications.
All that should be worth *something* extra on your paycheck, right? And if they aren’t, what are we all doing here exactly?
Full control over classes without all the other school BS is what I felt was most appealing. I had more of that as an ALT than as a licensed teacher. Where I am technically in charge but given all the other variables there isn’t much freedom.
As others mentioned, there are many kinds of university work, and they’re all pretty different.
First is part-time adjuncting. The pay can be low-ish without having a bunch of koma or doing other work on the side. Did that in my mid/late 20s, so pretty close in age and experience to the students, and it was easily the most fun and fulfilling time of my career. The biggest downside was being on the train six hours a day hopping from place to place.
Next is full-time contract based. Easily the longest working times for me, and 16 koma and 70+ hours a week (including adjuncting) was tiring. I felt fulfilled in that my work was actually helping people, but also thought burnout loomed on the horizon if I didn’t ease off the gas a bit. Other contract-based lecturers kept a much better work-life balance, so it isn’t that tough for everyone, but that might make it harder to further advance.
Then comes tenure-track. Teaching 4 koma a week now, which is great, but there’s a bunch of extra miscellaneous work, and the research expectations are much higher. I feel quite fulfilled, especially when guiding students in a close-knit zemi, though it’s still far from the giddiness of the first few years teaching. Glad to be able to settle down and do some bigger projects.
Finally is the holy grail of tenure. No experience with this yet, but all of the associate professors in my department have remained research powerhouses after tenure, so I imagine something’s driving them. Kind of a step up from that is the full professors managing the university and its departments. Now that I have an inkling of what they have to deal with, I am not envious nor eager to join their ranks, regardless of the salary.
Speaking of which, I never really thought about things like “deserving” one’s salary. There are many teachers who work much harder than I do and are paid much less. On the other hand, compared to all my old grad school friends who went into industry, I have the lowest salary by far. All I can say is I have no plans to coast after tenure, which is enough for my own moral compass.
It should be noted that my experiences are in Tokyo, which is a tough market. Things might be a bit better outside of shuto-ken / keihanshin. I know quite a few professors who have a relaxing job, low living costs, plenty of free time, and a nice place in the countryside with enough space to do all kinds of cool hobbies.
I have what some might describe as a glorified eikaiwa position at a university, which means I work through a middleman. But I still find it very fulfilling. It’s a fun course to teach, and I see improvement among my students, who are generally nice, hard working young people. It’s a good school though, so the students are accordingly not bad at English to begin with. I have some good coworkers, which always helps, and the admin and management are all good people. So I’m satisfied, yes.
My base salary is little higher than an eikaiwa teacher’s but because of the 22 weeks of paid holiday, if you divide it by the total time I actually spend at work each year, it’s about ¥4000 an hour. I think that’s about right considering the skills required. I wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t have at least a CELTA and a few years of solo teaching experience. Although I have a graduate degree in TESOL, I don’t think it’s necessary as there’s no materials/syllabus design or research requirement. If there were, I’d expect more work and more money.