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.
“I was extremely burnt out,” Marie said. “We had a teacher shortage, so all of my classes were overcrowded.”
When her district wanted to transfer her to a new school, she looked for opportunities abroad. 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. “I never have to crack down on behavior issues, and both students and teachers respect me so much,” Marie said. “I actually get to focus solely on teaching.”
Marie is part of a program by the South Korean government that is placing native English speakers with a college degree and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificates with local public schools, as it increases spending on education. 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.
“I’ve always been behind the desk, gathering minutes, gathering meetings, working for CEOs and it was just extremely draining,” Dlamini said.
Though she knew that finding a better job at home would be difficult – the youth unemployment rate in South Africa is notoriously high, at almost 70% – Dlamini still quit her job. After six months of job searching, she knew she would have to look elsewhere.
After she applied to the same program as Marie, she ended up in Incheon, the north-west South Korean city, as an English-language teacher. The free housing and low monthly expenses have allowed her to start paying off her debt while having enough savings to travel and plan for a master’s degree.
“One year ago, [I] could not have imagined the position I am in today,” Dlamini said. “I couldn’t afford food and had [accumulated] debt, so paying it off now and still [experiencing] life to the fullest – I am actually so grateful.”
John Bentley, co-founder of the International TEFL Academy, which offers TEFL certification courses, noted that interest in teaching English abroad particularly soared after the 2024 presidential election.
“With a difficult political and economic situation, we see gen Z turning to TEFL,” he said. “A lot of people go with the intention of staying for just one year. What happens is they fall in love with the country or experience and stay three [or] four years, or even much longer.”
This tracks with a broader trend of Americans who increasingly say that they want to migrate. Last year, a Gallup poll found that 40% of US women said they would move abroad if given the chance.
Marie said her South Korean classroom, which she shares with another teacher, is worlds apart from her former classroom in Florida, where she would handle more than 20 kids on her own.
“We always say that teaching is extremely undervalued in the US, but here you can tell how much they do value it,” she said. “The students are more receptive when I correct them and have so much respect for me as a teacher.”
