← Risk register SOC 25-1011 · reviewed 2026-08-11

Business Teachers, Postsecondary

82,150 US workers · median $99,080/yr · Education

EXPOSED

Much of the workload — building slide decks, writing syllabi and quiz banks, summarizing readings, drafting case studies, grading written assignments and giving feedback — is exactly what current models do at usable quality, and business content is the most heavily replicated subject matter on the internet. What survives is live classroom presence: running discussion-based case sessions, coaching student teams through consulting and capstone projects, and the alumni/recruiter network students are actually buying with tuition. No licensure protects the role, and the modal worker here is a contingent or non-tenure-track instructor teaching intro accounting, management, and marketing sections — the tier most exposed to larger sections, shared AI-built course shells, and online delivery.

10-year outlook: Intro and online business sections consolidate around AI-built course materials and fewer instructors, while faculty who run discussion-driven, employer-connected, and executive-ed teaching keep their seats.

US employment, 2019–2025-2.1%
83,92082,150 workers

Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.

Median pay $87,200 → $99,080 -9.1% in real terms (nominal +13.6%, less ~25% US inflation over the period)

The job count is not the verdict

This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.

So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.

BLS projection, 2024–2034

+5.7%

Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 82,150 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.

Exposed, but growing

AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +5.7% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.

Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.

~8,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.

One email if this score changes. Watch as many occupations as you like from the same address — no account, and nothing is sent on a schedule, only when a verdict actually moves.

Also known as — 24 job titles this covers

Titles reported by people doing this work, from the US Department of Labor's O*NET survey. If your job title is here, this page is about your work even though the name doesn't match.

TeacherLecturerProfessorInstructorFaculty MemberBanking TeacherFinance TeacherAdjunct LecturerBusiness TeacherBusiness LecturerCollege ProfessorFinance ProfessorMarketing TeacherAccounting TeacherAdjunct InstructorBanking InstructorBusiness ProfessorFinance InstructorAdvertising TeacherAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorBookkeeping TeacherBusiness InstructorManagement Lecturer

Score — 42/100 resistance

Holding it up: trust premium (13/20). Weakest point: liability shield (2/20).

Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The arithmetic is shown so you can check it: 9 + 8 + 2 + 13 + 10 = 42. · Scored 2026-08-11, and re-examined when evidence accumulates rather than on a schedule.

Task resistance 9/20

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Intro accounting, management, and marketing sections run on standardized content that a model can draft end to end — problem sets, cases, rubrics, discussion prompts — but the Socratic case session, cold-calling on a room of 60, and reading when a capstone team is quietly failing keep this out of the single digits' bottom, hence 9 rather than 4.

Embodiment 8/20

Some physical or field component You are physically in a lecture hall or seminar room on a fixed schedule, walking between team tables during group work and running in-person office hours, but the room is climate-controlled, the equipment is a projector, and a growing share of these sections already deliver fully online — that's a scheduling and presence constraint, not a hands-on one.

Liability shield 2/20

No licence, no signature requirement No state licence, no bar or CPA requirement to teach the material, and accreditation bodies like AACSB set faculty-qualification ratios at the institutional level — so the school can meet them with fewer bodies, adjuncts, or professionally-qualified practitioners, and nothing attaches personal legal exposure to you for what you teach.

Trust premium 13/20

The human relationship is the product Students choose sections by professor name, come back for recommendation letters and internship referrals, and MBA cohorts are explicitly paying for access to your industry contacts and placement network — that relationship is a real part of the product, though it sits at 13 rather than 18 because required intro sections get filled by whoever is assigned and most students never build a durable tie.

Judgment & accountability 10/20

Meaningful discretion You set grade boundaries, handle academic-integrity accusations, decide whether a struggling student gets an incomplete, and choose what goes in the syllabus — genuine discretion, but bounded by department curricula, common finals, appeals committees, and the fact that a bad call gets reviewed rather than becoming irreversible.

Confidence: medium · reviewed 2026-08-11 · how scoring works

What this job involves — and which parts are yours

The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.

AI already does these at usable quality

These still need a person

Active moats on the surviving side: trust, judgment

How to future-proof this job

Training paths for your skill gaps: Coursera — decision making under uncertainty free to audit · MIT OpenCourseWare — finance and accounting free · edX — supply chain and inventory management free to audit · Coursera — people management and team leadership specialisations free to audit · MIT OpenCourseWare — operations management free · Coursera — quality control and inspection courses, auditable free free to audit

All 35 skills ranked by how many jobs they open →

Where this experience transfers — occupations you could move toward

Computed from U.S. Dept. of Labor O*NET skill and knowledge profiles: high overlap with what you already do, a materially higher resistance score, no large jump in required training, and no licence you would have to start a new pipeline to get. Targets that pay meaningfully less, that are themselves COOKED, or whose own headcount is falling are excluded — a move into a shrinking trade is not an escape.

Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED · 59/100 · you already have ~81% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Judgment and Decision Making

Medical and Health Services Managers EXPOSED · 55/100 · you already have ~63% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Management of Financial Resources, Management of Material Resources, Management of Personnel Resources, Operations Analysis

Gambling Managers EXPOSED · 61/100 · you already have ~63% of the skill profile

Skills to close: Management of Personnel Resources, Management of Material Resources, Quality Control Analysis, Management of Financial Resources

What would move this back up — beyond any one person

The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 57/100, still EXPOSED.

5 specific changes that would raise this score
  • already happening task resistance +4

    Genuine two-tier structure: if AI absorbs slide decks, quiz banks, and first-pass grading, the residual job is live case facilitation, capstone/consulting-project supervision with real client firms, and academic-integrity adjudication — none of which current models run unsupervised. Task-mix shift raises resistance without any new rule, though it also shrinks headcount.

  • already happening trust premium +2

    Executive-education and MBA pricing already depends on a specific named human in the room (Wharton/HBS-style paid case teaching, corporate custom programs). If more revenue shifts to short-form exec-ed where the buyer is a corporate L&D budget choosing a person, the paid-for-human component of the occupation rises even as intro sections thin.

  • plausible trust premium +3

    AACSB accreditation standards continue to require 'faculty qualifications' and 'sufficiency' ratios computed from human faculty engagement in each program, and employers/recruiters keep treating named-faculty case sessions and letters of recommendation as the signal they pay for. If AACSB adds an explicit standard limiting the share of instruction delivered without a human instructor of record, the premium concentrates further.

  • plausible judgment accountability +3

    Instructor of record is the signer on grade appeals and academic-misconduct findings. If institutions adopt policies (as several Big Ten and Cal State campuses have drafted) requiring a named human faculty member to review and sign every AI-detection-based misconduct allegation and every contested grade, the role owns a consequential, appealable call under ambiguity.

  • plausible liability shield +3

    Narrow route only: state authorization and regional accreditor rules (SACSCOC, HLC) that require a qualified human instructor of record for credit-bearing courses, plus Title IV federal 'regular and substantive interaction' rules for distance education, which the Department of Education has already used to disqualify courses lacking instructor-initiated interaction. If ED enforces RSI against AI-only delivery, a human of record becomes financially mandatory — institutional liability, not personal, so the lift is small.

The limit. No personal licensure exists or is proposed for postsecondary teaching, so liability_shield cannot reach professional-signature levels. The upside is concentrated in elite, accredited, and exec-ed segments; for contingent intro-section instructors teaching large shared-shell courses, none of these levers reaches them, and task-mix shift raises the score of the surviving job while reducing the number of jobs.

These are conditions, not forecasts — what would have to happen, not what will. Specific rules, cases and bills are named so you can go and check whether they exist and where they stand; verify before relying on any of them. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.

Where this work is, and what it pays there

BLS metro figures for 170 areas. The verdict above does not change by city — the rubric judges what the work involves, not where it happens — but pay and headcount do, and the national median hides a very wide range.

Most of these jobs

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ 6,840 $104,770 +6%
Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH 3,250 $103,110 +4%
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN 2,450 $93,670 -5%
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 2,260 $107,170 +8%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA 2,050 $128,470 +30%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 1,870 $100,610 +2%
Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD 1,590 $107,120 +8%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 1,590 $128,370 +30%

Best paid

Wilmington, NC 170 $187,380 +89%
Lawrence, KS 150 $169,130 +71%
Anchorage, AK 50 $168,440 +70%

Percentages are against this occupation's national median of $99,080. Counts are jobs in that metro, not vacancies. Metros where the BLS suppressed the cell are absent rather than shown as zero.

Who is actually doing this — nobody, on the record

We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.

That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 42. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.

Read that as a gap in the reporting we can see, not proof of absence — the dispatch runs on English-language feeds and misses plenty. If you know of a case, tell us, or add a field report from inside the job.

Quick take — do you do this job?

Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.

Self-reported and unverified — a sentiment signal, not a survey. One response per person per occupation; you can change your answer.

Field reports — what people say has changed

No field reports yet. A written account takes a paragraph rather than a tap, goes to an editor before it appears, and is the one thing on this page the rubric cannot produce on its own.

File a field report

Concrete beats general: a tool that arrived, a task that moved, a headcount decision you watched happen. Don't include anything that identifies you or your employer if that would put you at risk.

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Kept current

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