{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/english-language-and-literature-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": "English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1123", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 57720, "median_annual_wage": 78760 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 46, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 8, "liability_shield": 2, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Grading a stack of comp essays against a rubric, building reading lists, and drafting lecture notes on Beloved are all things a model does in seconds, but a two-hour seminar where you read the room, redirect a student who has misread the poem's tone, and push a discussion past the obvious reading is not scriptable — roughly half the workload holds, which is why this sits at 11 rather than in the resistant teens.", "embodiment": "You are physically in a room three days a week — projecting to the back row, watching who has stopped taking notes, holding office hours where a student cries about their thesis — but the room is a climate-controlled classroom and everything you produce could be emailed, so this lands at 8 rather than the 14+ of work done outdoors or on machinery.", "liability_shield": "No state licenses postsecondary English instruction: a PhD or MFA is a hiring credential, not a legal gate, and adjuncts are routinely hired on a master's with a semester's notice — nobody's signature on a syllabus creates personal liability, hence 2.", "trust_premium": "Students choose your section, come back for your Victorian novel seminar, and ask you specifically for the recommendation letter because your name and your knowledge of their four drafts is the thing being vouched for — that repeat, named relationship is a real moat, though it stops short of 18 because gen-ed comp sections are assigned by registrar and taught by whoever is staffed.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide whether a paper is plagiarized or AI-generated and what that does to a student's transcript, whether a student who missed six weeks passes, and what a contested text is worth on the syllabus — genuine discretion with consequences, but appealable through department chairs and academic integrity committees rather than resting on you alone, which is what separates 11 from 16." }, "rationale": "The paper-facing half of this job — syllabus construction, lecture notes, reading guides, rubric-based comments on freshman comp essays, plagiarism triage — is exactly what language models do cheaply, and the writing assignments themselves are being destabilized by student AI use. The classroom half survives: running a live seminar where twenty people argue about a text, coaching a student through four drafts, writing the recommendation letter that carries a name behind it. The bigger near-term threat isn't AI replacing professors, it's collapsing English enrollment and adjunct-heavy staffing shrinking the seat count, and there is no license protecting the role.", "outlook": "The teaching relationship and the live seminar hold, but a decade of enrollment decline plus AI-cheapened grading and prep means fewer tenure lines, more adjunct sections, and survival concentrated among faculty who own advising, writing-program administration, and courses tied to professional degrees.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "If departments complete the shift already underway from take-home essays to assessment forms AI can't ghostwrite — in-class handwritten timed writing, oral defenses of drafts, one-on-one draft conferences, portfolio process documentation — the automatable tier (rubric comments on submitted prose) leaves the job and what remains is live, embodied coaching. This is a genuine two-tier occupation and the routine tier is the one being eaten.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "If AI-use allegations continue to route through faculty as the originating accuser in academic integrity cases — where the instructor's judgment call, not a detector score, is what an honor board can act on, and where several universities have already barred Turnitin AI scores as sole evidence — the role formally owns a consequential, appealable, sometimes litigated determination about a student's record.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "If the US Department of Education's 'regular and substantive interaction' requirement for distance education (34 CFR 600.2) is enforced or tightened to explicitly exclude AI-generated feedback and require an identified instructor of record, the human presence becomes a condition of Title IV aid eligibility rather than a preference — that is a purchasing rule, not sentiment.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "If accreditor faculty-credential rules (e.g. SACSCOC's 18 graduate semester hours in the discipline) are read to require a named credentialed human as instructor of record who signs the grade roster and cannot delegate that to a system, the role acquires a weak quasi-license anchor. Note this is institutional, not personal legal liability, so the ceiling here is low.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "If faculty union contracts add clauses reserving grading and course-content authorship to bargaining-unit members — language of the type CFA, PSC-CUNY, and several 2024-25 grad-worker contracts have sought on AI and workload — the human is contractually required for a defined slice of the work.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Every lever here protects the role's content, not its headcount. The binding constraint is English enrollment decline and adjunctification: a course can be fully human-taught, human-graded, accreditor-compliant and still not exist. Raising these dimensions changes what the surviving professor does, not how many survive." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 69140, "wage": 64910 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 68360, "wage": 66590 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 67930, "wage": 68490 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 64800, "wage": 69000 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 58480, "wage": 75930 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 57680, "wage": 74280 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 57600, "wage": 78130 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 59590, "wage": 78270 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 57720, "wage": 78760 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -16.5, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "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": [ "Management of Financial Resources", "Management of Material Resources", "Operations Analysis", "Social Perceptiveness" ] }, { "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": 85, "skills_to_close": [ "Social Perceptiveness", "Coordination", "Management of Financial Resources", "Mathematics" ] }, { "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 59, "median_wage": 128500, "overlap": 80, "skills_to_close": [ "Judgment and Decision Making", "Speaking" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }