EXPOSED
This is a residual bucket — program directors, accreditation and compliance administrators, deans of specialized units, corporate and correctional education managers — so the modal worker splits time between paperwork (accreditation self-studies, enrollment reports, budget narratives, course schedules, grant compliance filings) and human work (supervising instructors, resolving student and parent disputes, negotiating with agencies and funders). The paperwork half is squarely in reach of current AI, which drafts policy language, reconciles data, and assembles compliance packets faster than a small admin office can. What holds is the person who owns the decision when a faculty member is failing, an accreditor raises a finding, or a program has to be cut — and who signs their name to it.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $85,450 → $95,200 -10.9% in real terms
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
+2.5% 60,200 → 61,700 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +2.5% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 49/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
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.
~4,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
AttacheGrant ManagerDivision ChiefField DirectorArea SupervisorLibrary DirectorTesting DirectorSchool SupervisorEducation DirectorDirector of ResearchEducation SupervisorEducational DirectorGrants AdministratorExtension Work DirectorApprenticeship ConsultantHealth Education DirectorDirector of Extension WorkDirector of Health EducationExtension Course CoordinatorApprenticeship RepresentativeDirector of Vocational TrainingSpecial Education AdministratorDirector of in Service EducationDirector of Professional Services
The BLS uses Education Administrators, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Roughly half the week — enrollment dashboards, catalog and schedule updates, Title IV or Perkins compliance filings, accreditation self-study narratives assembled from data you already report elsewhere — is drafting and reconciliation that a model does in a first pass, while the other half (sitting with an instructor whose evaluations collapsed, walking an accreditor through a finding, telling a funder why cohort completion dropped) does not survive being handed to software, which is what puts this at 10 rather than the 5 a pure reporting role would get.
Some physical or field component You are on campus — classroom observations, facility walk-throughs before a site visit, showing up in a correctional education wing or a hospital training unit where badge access and physical presence are the job — but none of it is skilled manual work, so the physical component is attendance and inspection rather than anything a machine would need hands to replicate.
Certification preferred, not legally required Most positions in this bucket require a master's and administrative experience but no state-issued license that attaches personal liability the way a principal's or superintendent's certificate does; the institution's accreditation and its Clery/FERPA/Title IX exposure sit with the president or the general counsel, and a designated compliance officer's signature is institutional, not personal, which is why this lands at 6 rather than in licensed territory.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls When an accreditor issues a finding, when a program's enrollment no longer supports its faculty line, when a student grievance against an instructor is credible but not provable, you make the call under incomplete facts and it becomes the institution's position — there is no procedure manual for cutting a program or non-renewing an instructor, and the consequences land on people's employment and students' credentials.
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.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (10/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (6/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (12/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 32 of this occupation's 49 points (65%).
Embodiment (7/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
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 64/100, still EXPOSED.
State licensure/approval regimes for specific program types — correctional education program directors under state DOC contracts, clinical program directors requiring a licensed director of record (nursing programs under state boards of nursing already require a named, credentialed program administrator). Expansion of 'named director of record' requirements to more specialized units, or Clery/Title IX coordinator designations being folded into these roles, attaches personal liability.
Genuine two-tier structure: if reporting, budget narratives, schedule building and compliance packet assembly are automated, what remains is faculty performance management, accreditor site-visit response, funder negotiation, and dispute adjudication — all low-volume, high-ambiguity. Task-mix shift alone raises the share of the day AI cannot do at usable quality, without any new law.
Accreditor and federal rules that name a specific individual as personally accountable signatory: regional accreditors (e.g. SACSCOC, MSCHE) already require a named institutional accreditation liaison officer, and ED's program participation agreements require a designated Title IV compliance officer whose certification of enrollment/attendance data carries False Claims Act exposure. If accreditors add an explicit attestation that AI-generated self-study or assessment evidence was reviewed and adopted by the named officer, the sign-off becomes non-delegable.
If institutions adopt AI-governance policies requiring a human administrator to be the accountable decision-maker for any adverse action driven by algorithmic flags (academic integrity findings, early-alert dismissals, program discontinuation), the role's remaining work is concentrated in contested calls. Illinois HB 3773 and NYC Local Law 144-style rules on automated decision tools point this direction for employment; extension to student-facing decisions would do it here.
Narrow route only: accreditor site visits and agency/funder negotiations where the counterparty is itself a human committee that requires an accountable human interlocutor. Grant funders (state agencies, foundations) requiring a named human program officer of contact is common; buyers do not otherwise pay a premium for a human administrator, so the upside is small.
The limit. This is a residual SOC bucket, so any lever applies unevenly — the clinical/correctional/Title IV subsets can gain real liability shielding while corporate training managers and generic program coordinators have essentially no route. Aggregate movement is capped by that heterogeneity: the code as a whole is unlikely to leave the exposed band even if its regulated subsets harden considerably.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 3,940 | $83,990 -12% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 3,130 | $90,990 -4% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 2,600 | $132,400 +39% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 2,010 | $103,990 +9% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 1,670 | $90,000 -5% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,600 | $75,450 -21% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 1,130 | $79,060 -17% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 1,090 | $128,410 +35% |
| Visalia, CA | 80 | $157,490 +65% |
| Modesto, CA | 90 | $150,500 +58% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 2,600 | $132,400 +39% |
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 49. 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.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.