{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/communications-teachers-postsecondary/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Communications Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1122", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 29420, "median_annual_wage": 78580 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 47, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 10, "embodiment": 11, "liability_shield": 2, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Half the job — writing the public-speaking syllabus, building rhetoric lecture decks, generating discussion prompts on media effects, marking speech self-reflections against a rubric — is text-in/text-out work an LLM does at passable quality, while the irreducible half is standing in a room watching a student's hands shake through their informative speech and deciding in real time whether to interrupt or let them finish.", "embodiment": "You are physically in a classroom or speech lab most contact hours, positioning a camera, watching posture and eye contact and vocal projection in a body you can only assess in person — but it's a scheduled, climate-controlled room on a campus, not a job site, which is why this sits mid-scale rather than high.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates who teaches COMM 101 — a master's degree and a department chair's hiring decision is the whole barrier, and adjuncts are hired on that basis every August with no personal legal exposure for what happens in the room.", "trust_premium": "Students take Public Speaking terrified, and the reason they show up and actually deliver is that a specific instructor learned their name, remembered last week's speech, and gave feedback they trusted; that relationship also produces the recommendation letters and mentorship that survive long past the course, though the intro-course, fungible-section structure keeps it below the 17-20 range of true one-to-one practice.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide whether a student's argument on a contested political topic gets protected as advocacy or flagged as a classroom-conduct issue, whether a plagiarized or AI-drafted speech outline becomes an academic-integrity referral, and where the line is on a C+ versus B- for persuasive delivery — real discretion, but exercised inside departmental rubrics, appeal processes, and accreditation-driven learning outcomes that constrain the call." }, "rationale": "Lecture drafting, slide decks, syllabus writing, rubric-based grading of essays and speech reflections, and discussion-prompt generation are already handled competently by LLMs — that's a large share of the weekly workload. What holds is the live room: coaching a nervous student through a five-minute persuasive speech, reading an audience in real time, running peer critique, and being the person whose judgment on a student's argument actually counts. The bigger threat isn't AI replacing the professor, it's enrollment decline plus adjunctification compressing headcount while AI absorbs prep and grading labor.", "outlook": "The teaching core survives in the speech lab and the mentoring relationship, but prep and grading labor collapses and departments consolidate — expect fewer tenure lines, more adjuncts, and premium placed on faculty who run live, performance-based assessment.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift is genuinely available here: if departments formally reassign prep, slide and rubric-grading labor to AI and redefine the load as live coaching, speech-lab supervision, and in-person oral defense of arguments, the residual job is the tier LLMs cannot do. Watch for accreditation-driven 'oral competency' requirements (e.g., regional accreditors or state general-education mandates specifying a proctored live speech component) that make in-person performance assessment non-substitutable.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "If institutions adopt policies making the instructor of record the named human adjudicator for AI-misconduct findings in written and spoken assignments — a signed determination that survives student appeal and Title IX/due-process review, as several university honor-code revisions since 2023 have begun requiring — the role owns consequential calls under ambiguity rather than delegating to detection software.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "If employer-facing credentials for oral communication (e.g., NCA-endorsed or state workforce-board speech certifications) require assessment by a human evaluator present in the room, buyers are paying specifically for a human's verdict rather than a course.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "If curricula shift toward in-person speech labs, debate coaching, and clinical-style communication training for health and law programs — where interpersonal performance must be observed physically — the share of work located in an unpredictable live room rises.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Liability shield has no plausible route: no license is required to teach postsecondary communications and no personal liability attaches to grading. And no lever here addresses the dominant threat named in the description — enrollment decline and adjunctification cutting headcount. A course can be judgment-heavy and still be taught by half as many people on contingent contracts, so the register score can rise while the occupation shrinks." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 28770, "wage": 66510 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 29100, "wage": 68910 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 29120, "wage": 70630 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 28430, "wage": 71030 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 27330, "wage": 77560 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 27350, "wage": 76250 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 28520, "wage": 79910 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 29260, "wage": 77800 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 29420, "wage": 78580 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 2.3, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "secondary-school-teachers-except-special-and-career-technical-education", "title": "Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 69, "median_wage": 72040, "overlap": 89, "skills_to_close": [ "Coordination", "Mathematics", "Social Perceptiveness", "Quality Control Analysis" ] }, { "slug": "art-drama-and-music-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 78620, "overlap": 87, "skills_to_close": [ "Operations Analysis", "Speaking", "Time Management" ] }, { "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 59, "median_wage": 128500, "overlap": 81, "skills_to_close": [ "Speaking" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }