I’m a 5th year JET and my BOE was looking into hiring me on directly next year. They were pretty deep into the process when they suddenly said they couldn’t do it because they realized they get a yearly ¥5,000,000 grant from the government if they use JET and they wouldn’t receive this if they hired me directly.
If this is the case, why do some BOEs use dispatch companies or direct hire if they would miss out on this money? Was my BOE correct about this grant or is there some kind of misunderstanding?
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They were right about the grant, AFAIK.
Real talk? JET ALTs are a pain in the arse compared to dispatch because you actually have to deal with them. Private companies, you just deal with the company and don’t worry about dealing with the ALT if you don’t want to.
Based on figures I have heard, I don’t think the BOEs save that much money (if any), it’s just waaaaay less responsibility for them, not just in terms of the job, but all the support that JET ALTs require. Not saying that is wrong. That is the entire point of the Programme.
As a disgusting tax payer, this enrages me.
So, instead of using a battle hardened full time seishain education professional, with more than 5 years of experience, they want to waste *my* hard-earned taxes on some newkid who hasn’t even been kancho’d yet?
It’s a fucking disgrace.
JET isn’t what you think it is. It’s an exchange program. The idea is to exchange cute culture stuff for business opportunities. Every prefecture that uses JET gets free visa opportunities in the participating nation for business ventures, “research” where they steal intellectual property for companies in their prefecture, sales opportunities, etc….
The program is a visa swap scheme where Japan has a HUGE advantage. Japanese people get visas in exchange for issuing visas to foreigners. On the Japan end they burry the foreigners in schools with do nothing jobs so they never have a chance to influence any real business. On the other end Japan demands visas for local businesses and universities AND that those people get “positions of importance”. Until recently local businesses controlled things like the PTA and had huge influence over the BOE.
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TL;DR: for every ALT coming in a visa is issued in the nation the ALT came from. No JET coming in, no business or research visa going out.
With regards to Dispatch companies. They do all the leg work, whereas BOE has to deal with all JET ALTs themselves.
Tin foil hat terminally online theories aside, it’s more than likely opportunities for better fiscal management are missed by virtue of Japan’s apathetic snail pace to sweeping change.
Would it be better and more cost effective for everyone if Japan did all it’s ALT hiring in-house to the letter of the immigration law itself?(12 years education in native language. That’s it. That’s all ) Yes. Will they? No.
Japan’s baseline education system is weird as Fuck as it is. Requiring an entrance exam for a high school education is weird as Fuck. Having septate BOEs for high school vs. the rest is weird as Fuck.
But here we are
Chances are someone already knew about this and were just going through the motions rather than saying no to you outright. It’s the Japanese way unfortunately. So it would appear that your ride on the gravy train has officially come to an end. Don’t feel too bad – at least you had five years of it which is more than most people have. Your choices now are either return to your home country and try to start back with where you left off or stay in Japan and end up working for Interac or some other shady dispatch company.
Not sure about the grant, but I can say that I know the government pays a good chunk of the JET salary. Maybe it’s the same thing? My BoE has a handful of direct hires who have been there forever (20+ years). They no longer direct hire because it’s not as cost effective.
There are a lot of difficulties involved in managing an ALT. The JET program and CLAIR offer that grant and some support, but the day-to-day management of the ALT falls primarily on the contracting organizations. Some places don’t want to or have the capacity to hire and support an ALT. In addition to the actual ALT work, the contracting organizations might have to arrange housing, transportation, bank accounts, cars, cell phone contracts, medical care and a whole host of things for the ALT. Dispatch companies take care of all this. They give money to the dispatch and an ALT shows up at school when they request it.
In regards to the Japanese staff at a municipal level, a lot of them have little international experience and might not even be able to communicate with the ALT because of their lack of English skills. Of course, providing Japanese staff an opportunity to work with foreigners is a part of the internationalization and exchange aspects of the program and many places view this as a positive thing. But that sentiment isn’t necessarily universal.
Another thing is that they also sometimes choose dispatch due to bad experiences with ALTs. Like an extreme case would be someone who after a few months decides they don’t want to be here and books a flight and leaves without telling anyone. I knew someone who did this and it was a headache for their BOE who had to deal with all their unpaid bills and dirty apartment. It was too late to get an alternate on JET and the next opportunity to get someone over was months away so that position went unfilled. If it was dispatch, they always have people coming in and able to fill spots. There are a lot of good ALTs, but if you scroll reddit for long enough you see some horror stories that put things in context.
I think dispatch companies are terrible and they shouldn’t exist. But the ALT system as a whole has a lot of flaws that they can use to justify their own existence.
Majority of that 5 million yen is going to the people they need to pay to supervise ALTs. So it’s not like they’re really saving money.
I was told each school can only have 1 jet, so a combined middle and high school could have 2 jets. One for each “school”. If a school wants more Alts/English teachers they need to hire through a dispatch company
Two things about JET:
1) The program was built around the idea that people would return to their home country after working for a couple years.
2) the program was never designed to be successful, it was an idea that failed into legislation.
so if you are wondering why it seems so haphazzard, well, it was.
To those who tried to answer my actual question, thanks. I’ve never seen any hard figures on just how much of a JET’s salary is subsidized by the national government. The ¥5,000,000 my BOE referenced would be a huge amount to turn down (since that would cover a JET’s salary with quite a bit left over) if it was per JET. But after seeing other responses to my question, it’s likely the ¥5,000,000 is a sum that is split amongst all the JETs in my city. This makes it a lot easier to see how BOEs could forego this partial salary subsidy to do dispatch or direct hire.
If anybody has any info on how these grants are calculated or the conditions of their use (such as if all the ALTs in the town have to be JETs), I’d be interested.
Imagine you can choose between preparing your own meals or having a cook preparing them for you.
With the difference that you don’t have to use your own money for hiring the cook.
And this cook sometimes comes offering you wold-class meals and obviously at a higher price than what you’d usually spend should you buy the things and cook yourself potentially buying better ingredients.
Basically it’s just pure laziness 🤷🏻♂️
The grant seems to track with my experience. I had a really unique experience where the BoE hired directly for high school ALTs, but junior high/elementary school ALTs were through JET. I was working as one of the direct hires and I once inquired, why couldn’t they make the JHS/ES positions direct hire too and they said they got goverment grants/subsidies for having JETs and wouldn’t be able to afford ourtright hiring everyone directly.