Degrees of uncertainty

And if so many teachers are concerned about working without a degree, then exactly how many teachers are gaining employment using false documentation?

Well, all sorts of figures have been suggested over the years, but if I was betting on it, I’d say somewhere around 30 percent of the foreign teachers in Thailand are working with fake documents. That’s one teacher in three. Surprised? Time to delve deeper.

Scour any TEFL jobs webboard in Thailand and you’ll see that almost every vacant teaching position carries a combined TEFL certificate plus bachelor’s degree requirement. Some of the more hopeful establishments might even ask for a master’s degree.

But turn your attention to the TEFL discussion boards, and controversy continues to rage about whether a degree makes a good teacher or not. There’s no questioning the value of a teacher training certificate, but is a degree absolutely necessary?

There are those who say that a degree is an educational “benchmark”. It proves that an individual has devoted several years of life to absorbing lectures, analysing theories and preparing themselves for work. Then there are others who say that university is just an excuse to lounge around and work hard at doing very little.

To add further fuel to the argument, ask any teacher who’s worked in Thailand for any length of time about this issue and they’ll all have their own story of the degree-holding colleague from Hell — the teacher who turns up for work late, is hated by every student on the campus, has a chronic drinking problem, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is possibly the dullest teacher on Earth.

But for the new arrival from the UK or the US, these arguments are meaningless. When it comes to teaching in Thailand, you’ve either got a degree or you haven’t.

In Thailand, only multinational companies tend to use evaluation methods such as competency tests and truly try to get “inside” the individual. For most hirers in Thailand, the degree certificate, with its fancy font and embossed finish, means everything.

Unfortunately, one body that certainly possesses this “degree is everything” mindset is the Ministry of Education. Applying for a teacher’s licence at the Ministry of Education is the first step for any teacher looking to obtain a work permit and thus becoming legally employed.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been moves to change this mindset. In 2003, a group of powerful and influential Bangkok language school owners got together to form a group called “Farang Rak Thai”.

The group’s objective was to visit the ministry and try to convince the chief minister that the government’s insistence on teachers having a degree in order to obtain a teacher’s license was doing nothing to ease the foreign teacher shortage, a shortage that was beginning to bite hard.

Alas, the meeting appointment was not kept and the two parties never met or re-scheduled. Thailand became embroiled in the worsening bird-flu saga and the moment passed and the situation remained unchanged.

Anecdotal stories of teachers who have side-stepped the degree requirement through “connections” occasionally surface, especially in the more rural areas, but the stories are few and far between. We can safely file them under Teaching in Thailand folklore.

So is this the point where all those without a degree stop reading this article, abandon all hope of ever teaching in Thailand, and return to routine 9-5 job slavery? Far from it. As they say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, and this is true of teaching in Thailand.

Failing to mention the availability of bogus degrees in Bangkok — and perhaps one or two other Thai cities — is to do the topic of teaching and degrees a gross injustice. Fake degrees really are out there and are readily available.

Recently, Ajarn.com took an evening stroll along Khao San Road and was offered a bachelor’s degree for as low as 600 baht — or an outrageous 900 baht if we wanted the transcripts to go with them. The sellers aren’t too difficult to locate, either.

Better-quality documents — that’s to say ones that don’t look as though they’ve been knocked up on a home PC — are priced slightly higher.

Some foreign interviewers do say that they can recognise a fake degree from one end of Khao San Road to the other and apparently one or two officers in the ministry are getting good at it as well. Stories abound of teachers going for interviews only to find that the academic director on the other side of the table went to the same university — except he really did go to the university.

For example, if the teacher turns out to be unprofessional, unreliable, and a thoroughly bad hire, then schools have been known to launch a witch-hunt, asking the teacher to supply them with an official letter of verification on university letter-headed paper. In some cases, the school might even chase after degree verification themselves.

However, this isn’t always possible. Ask 10 people whether an employer is legally entitled to do their own detective work, and you’ll get 10 different answers. Some overseas universities charge a fairly hefty fee for a verification service. Others are governed by privacy protection acts. Some colleges will only issue a letter if the student graduated within the last 25 years, and then there are some colleges that have closed down or burned to the ground.

To add another perspective to the story, it’s worth remembering that there are also schools here that find out an instructor’s degree is fake and yet continue to employ them. If a teacher is good at his or her job and popular with students, it sometimes makes sense for the school to turn a blind eye.

After all, demand for teachers is currently outstripping supply in spectacular fashion. The last thing a school wants is to get involved in yet another interview-and-recruitment merry-go-round. There are even rumours of schools that make degrees themselves, or, at the very least, pat a new teacher on the head and point them in the direction of Khao San Road.

Seeking a legal opinion on all this, a Thai lawyer from one of Thailand’s oldest established law firms told Ajarn.com that working with fake documents is a very serious offence and there can be dire consequences if the teacher is caught.

In the eyes of Thai law, such a person is, in effect, cheating the government, and that’s never going to sit well. The lawyer summarised the situation by saying it’s far riskier to work with bogus certificates than it is to work illegally without a work permit. And so, working illegally is what many non-degreed teachers choose to do.

The crux of the matter is that Thailand is a long way off from being an educational utopia where every TEFL classroom contains a teacher who is a genuine degree holder. The bottom line is that there are not enough qualified teachers. There’s nothing complicated about the reason for this: the salaries are usually poor and there’s little or no government help if the teacher falls sick or is made redundant.

What this ultimately means is that the stamp of quality that comes with a degree isn’t always what it seems. While most degree-holders may be genuine, they may not necessarily make good teachers. On the other hand, good teachers may have to break the law in order to teach in Thailand. And ultimately, it’s the profession and the standard of education in Thailand that suffers.

Phil Williams is webmaster of Ajarn.com (www.ajarn.com). This article is adapted from a feature on Ajarn.com and is reprinted here with kind permission. The views expressed on other parts of Ajarn.com are not necessarily held by learning post or the Bangkok Post. Email the author at philip@ajarn.com or learningpost@bangkokpost.co.th if you have any views on this subject.