{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/economics-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": "Economics Teachers, Postsecondary",
    "soc_code": "25-1063",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 11560,
    "median_annual_wage": 123920
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 45,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 9,
    "embodiment": 9,
    "liability_shield": 3,
    "trust_premium": 14,
    "judgment_accountability": 10
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Micro/macro problem sets, multiple-choice midterms, Stata/R regression scripts and lit reviews are all reproducible by a model today, which is why this sits at 9 rather than mid-teens; the residue that holds — running a live 15-person seminar where you push back on a student's identification strategy, reading a dissertation chapter that isn't working yet, and writing the recommendation letter a hiring committee will actually weigh — is real but is a minority of contact hours in a 200-seat Principles course.",
    "embodiment": "The physical demand is standing in front of a lecture hall for three 50-minute sessions, working a chalkboard or clicker, and holding office hours — a controlled indoor environment with no equipment to handle, which is why this is closer to the desk end than to lab-science or clinical faculty who must be in a specific room with specific apparatus.",
    "liability_shield": "There is no state licence to teach economics; the credential is a PhD and a departmental hiring vote, and accreditors (SACSCOC, AACSB for b-schools) audit faculty qualifications at the program level, not by issuing you a personal ticket that can be pulled — so nothing legally requires a named human to deliver the content of ECON 101.",
    "trust_premium": "At 14 the relationship is doing the work that the content cannot: students choose sections by professor, dissertation advising is a multi-year named commitment, your recommendation letter is trusted because a specific economist with a reputation signed it, and consulting or expert-witness work follows the person out of the department — none of that transfers to whoever inherits the syllabus.",
    "judgment_accountability": "Grade curves, academic-integrity referrals, deciding whether a dissertation is defensible, and choosing what to claim from noisy identification are genuine discretion, but they run inside faculty handbooks, departmental grade norms and IRB/committee review, and a wrong call is appealed rather than catastrophic — that combination lands at 10, not at the level of someone whose single judgment ends a career or a life."
  },
  "rationale": "The bulk of an econ professor's week — building lecture decks, writing problem sets and exams, grading, summarizing literature, running regressions and drafting papers — is exactly the text-and-numbers work current models do at usable quality, and online sections are the most exposed of all. What persists is the live seminar, thesis and dissertation supervision, letters of recommendation, and being the named human who assigns a grade and defends a research claim. The real threat here is structural: enrollment pressure, adjunctification, and larger sections shrink headcount faster than AI replaces the teaching act itself.",
  "outlook": "Expect flat-to-declining tenure-track lines with more work pushed to adjuncts and large or online sections, while faculty who own supervision, live assessment, and applied policy work stay employed.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Enforcement or tightening of the US Department of Education's 'regular and substantive interaction' requirement for distance education (34 CFR 600.2) — plus accreditor standards (SACSCOC 6.2, HLC) requiring a credentialed faculty of record who personally certifies grades and academic integrity findings — makes a named economist legally necessary for Title IV eligibility of every online section. Currently under active negotiated-rulemaking attention.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Journal and funder authorship rules that bar AI as author and require a named human to attest to data provenance and results (COPE guidance, AEA Data and Code Availability Policy, NSF/NIH AI disclosure terms) — if replication-failure or research-misconduct proceedings begin attaching personal consequences to the signing economist for AI-generated regressions.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Institutional academic-integrity policy shifting AI-misuse adjudication onto the course instructor as first-instance decider with due-process exposure (already spreading in honor-code revisions post-2023); combined with grade-appeal regimes where the professor must defend a contested grade in writing.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift: if departments respond to AI-written problem sets by moving assessment to oral exams, in-person proctored finals, and supervised replication projects — as some econ departments have begun doing — the remaining day is live viva, thesis supervision, and case-by-case judgment rather than deck-building and grading. Genuine two-tier occupation.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Employer- and grad-admissions-side reliance on named human letters of recommendation with verified authorship (e.g., econ PhD programs explicitly discounting or banning AI-drafted letters), plus AACSB/liberal-arts marketing of small human-taught seminars as the paid-for differentiator against AI tutors.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "The binding constraint is not capability but headcount economics: adjunctification and section-size growth can cut positions even if every dimension above rises, since the levers protect the role of 'faculty of record' rather than the number of them. No plausible route raises embodiment."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 12770,
        "wage": 98350
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 12750,
        "wage": 101480
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 13270,
        "wage": 104370
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 13080,
        "wage": 107260
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 11790,
        "wage": 104940
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 11640,
        "wage": 103930
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 12210,
        "wage": 115300
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 12420,
        "wage": 119980
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 11560,
        "wage": 123920
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -9.5,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [
    {
      "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary",
      "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary",
      "verdict": "EXPOSED",
      "risk_resistance": 59,
      "median_wage": 128500,
      "overlap": 74,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Judgment and Decision Making",
        "Negotiation",
        "Speaking"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}