{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/computer-science-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": "Computer Science Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1021", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 35480, "median_annual_wage": 96980 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 50, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 8, "liability_shield": 5, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 12 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Grading autogradable programming assignments, refreshing lecture decks on recursion, and fielding office-hour debugging questions are all now one prompt away, but running a live 200-seat lecture where you read confusion off faces, sitting on an ABET curriculum committee, and supervising a two-semester capstone team through scope collapse are not, which is why this sits at the middle of the mixed band rather than in the automatable floor.", "embodiment": "You are physically in a room — proctoring closed-book exams so students can't prompt their way through, staffing hardware and networking labs with real switches and embedded boards, and holding scheduled in-person office hours — but none of it is uncontrolled or physically demanding, so it lands at the low end of the partial-physical band rather than up with clinical or field work.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates who teaches CS 101; a master's or PhD plus departmental hiring and regional accreditation standards for faculty credentials is the whole barrier, and no statute makes you personally answerable for a graduate who ships insecure code — which is credential preference, not legal protection.", "trust_premium": "Recommendation letters, PhD and thesis advising, and being the named person a student cites when a hiring manager asks who vouches for them are non-transferable relationships an institution cannot reassign mid-dissertation; the 14 rather than 18 reflects that the large intro-service courses most of these instructors actually teach are interchangeable to the student.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide academic-integrity cases where the student swears the AI-flagged submission is theirs, set the curve that determines who stays in the major, and choose whether a language or framework enters the curriculum for the next four cohorts — real discretion with appeals processes and department chairs above you, which keeps it out of the top band." }, "rationale": "The paper-and-screen half of this job — writing lecture slides, generating problem sets, autograding code, drafting syllabi, answering routine 'why won't my loop compile' questions — is exactly what LLMs do well, and CS is the one discipline where students already have a free tutor better at explaining pointers than most TAs. What survives is embodied classroom presence, research supervision, capstone and thesis advising, curriculum design under accreditation pressure, and the degree-granting institution's monopoly on credentials. The modal worker here is a teaching-heavy lecturer or community-college instructor, not a tenured R1 researcher; the lecturer tier is more exposed than the research tier.", "outlook": "Enrollment in CS stays strong but lecture-delivery roles thin out as content commoditizes; the instructors who hold projects, labs, advising, and assessment integrity keep their seats.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Accreditation bodies (ABET's Computing Accreditation Commission, and regional accreditors like SACSCOC/MSCHE) already require that courses be taught by faculty with documented terminal-degree or equivalent qualification, and that credit-hour instruction involve 'regular and substantive interaction' with a qualified instructor — the same US Dept. of Education distance-education rule (34 CFR 600.2) that killed unsupervised correspondence-style courses for Title IV eligibility. If ED or accreditors explicitly rule that AI-generated instruction and AI-only feedback do not satisfy 'regular and substantive interaction,' and that a named faculty member of record must personally certify grades and learning-outcome assessment, a licensed-equivalent signature requirement attaches to every credit-bearing CS section. Watch also state authorization reciprocity (NC-SARA) guidance on AI instructors.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 6 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Academic-integrity adjudication in CS has become the highest-stakes ambiguity call on campus: AI-written code is undetectable, and an instructor's determination of plagiarism carries appealable, sometimes litigated, consequences for a student's visa status or degree. If institutions formalize the instructor of record as the accountable adjudicator (as many honor-code policies already do) rather than routing to automated detection, and courts continue to require human-reviewed evidence in student disciplinary appeals, the role owns more consequential calls, not fewer. Similarly, sole authority over letters of recommendation, thesis pass/fail, and capstone client deliverables.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier structure: if the routine tier (lecture delivery, autograding, syntax debugging, problem-set generation) is fully automated, the residual job is the judgment tier — curriculum redesign for a post-AI labor market, ABET outcomes assessment, research supervision, capstone sponsorship with industry partners, and lab-based assessment where the student must demonstrate reasoning live. Concretely visible where departments replace take-home programming assignments with oral code defenses and proctored whiteboard assessment, which cannot be delegated to a model.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Employer signaling is the mechanism, not student preference: if major tech employers or professional bodies begin discounting credentials from programs without human-verified assessment — analogous to how bar examiners and medical boards refuse unaccredited pathways — institutions gain reason to advertise faculty contact hours as the product. Watch for named-faculty small-cohort programs marketed explicitly against MOOC/AI alternatives, and union contracts (e.g., CFA, PSC-CUNY, AAUP chapters) that cap section sizes or bar AI-substituted instruction.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Narrow route: shift of CS instruction toward hardware, robotics, networking labs, and embedded systems where assessment requires physical presence at benches and equipment, plus proctored in-person examination as the response to take-home cheating. This raises presence requirements but does not make the work physically unpredictable in the way trades are.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "The lecturer tier faces a hard budget ceiling that no dimension score captures: even a strong faculty-of-record signature requirement can be satisfied by one instructor supervising AI across many more sections, so the protection accrues to the role while the headcount falls. Enrollment is the binding constraint — CS undergraduate enrollment softening alongside entry-level SWE hiring reduces demand regardless of how defensible the teaching task is. Contingent and adjunct positions absorb that contraction first, and no accreditation rule requires that the faculty of record be full-time." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 50, 46 ], "run_verdicts": [ "EXPOSED", "EXPOSED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 32230, "wage": 78630 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 32430, "wage": 82220 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 31800, "wage": 85180 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 32230, "wage": 85540 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 37600, "wage": 77910 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 33870, "wage": 84760 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 36150, "wage": 96430 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 36240, "wage": 96690 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 35480, "wage": 96980 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 10.1, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "education-administrators-kindergarten-through-secondary", "title": "Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 69, "median_wage": 105870, "overlap": 66, "skills_to_close": [ "Management of Financial Resources", "Management of Personnel Resources", "Management of Material Resources", "Coordination" ] }, { "slug": "chief-executives", "title": "Chief Executives", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 69, "median_wage": 213990, "overlap": 64, "skills_to_close": [ "Management of Financial Resources", "Management of Material Resources", "Coordination", "Persuasion" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }