{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/foreign-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": "Foreign Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1124", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 19830, "median_annual_wage": 79350 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 40, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 9, "embodiment": 7, "liability_shield": 2, "trust_premium": 13, "judgment_accountability": 9 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Roughly half your week resists automation — the Spanish 201 conversation hour, correcting a student's aspect error while explaining why a Mexican speaker would phrase it differently, running a seminar on Rulfo where the point is the argument between students — but the other half (syllabus revision, drill and quiz banks, vocabulary lists, glossing readings, marking short compositions and translation sets, and writing the paragraph of feedback at the bottom) is now first-draftable in minutes, which is what pins this at 9 rather than the 14+ of a role whose outputs can't be prompted.", "embodiment": "You are in a room with bodies — modelling pronunciation and mouth position, reading the confusion on a face mid-drill, chaperoning the study-abroad term or the conversation table over dinner — but nothing you do requires a truck, a lab bench, or a hard hat, and the pandemic proved the course can be delivered over Zoom at real cost rather than total failure, which is what keeps this at 7 instead of 13.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates postsecondary language instruction: a department can staff Elementary French with an adjunct, a graduate TA, or a native-speaker lecturer holding an MA, and the PhD is a hiring credential your dean can waive, not a statute that requires a named human to sign off on your students' credit hours — hence 2 rather than the 11+ of professions where deregistration ends the career.", "trust_premium": "Students pick your section, come back for the 300-level because of you, ask you for the letter of recommendation to the Fulbright, and take a language largely because a specific instructor made the cohort worth showing up to — that relationship is genuinely the product at 13, but it stops short of the high teens because enrolment is mostly driven by degree requirements and scheduling, and a department can substitute another instructor between terms without students walking away.", "judgment_accountability": "You make real calls with consequences — placement and proficiency-level decisions, whether a suspiciously fluent essay is DeepL and therefore an academic-integrity referral, what to cut from a canon under a 14-week cap, grades that affect scholarships — but you make them inside departmental rubrics, common finals, and an appeals process where the chair and the dean own the final ruling, which is a 9 and not the 15 of someone whose signature is the last one on the file." }, "rationale": "The classroom hour — live conversation practice, error correction with cultural context, seminar discussion of literature — still needs a person, and students pay for the cohort and the mentor. But the surrounding work (drafting syllabi and lesson plans, building vocabulary and grammar drills, generating reading glosses, grading translation exercises and short compositions, writing feedback) is exactly what LLMs do well, and free machine translation has already gutted the instrumental case for enrolling in a language sequence. The near-term threat to this occupation is not an AI teaching Spanish 201 — it is deans closing under-enrolled language departments, which is already happening.", "outlook": "The professors who survive the next decade will mostly be the ones whose courses are oral, upper-division, or tied to a professional track; the general-education language sequence keeps shrinking and taking positions with it.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Institutional or accreditor rules that make live human-assessed oral proficiency the only accepted credential — e.g. ACTFL OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) or CEFR-aligned oral exams required by state teacher-certification boards, seminaries, or federal programs (Boren, Fulbright, DLI/FSI ratings). If a degree audit requires an in-person tester rather than an AI-scored oral, the human hour becomes non-substitutable for the credential, not just the learning.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift: once drill construction, glossing and first-pass composition grading are handed to LLMs, the residual day is live conversational repair, literary interpretation in seminar, and dissertation/thesis direction — the tier machines do worst. This raises the score only if departments survive to retain the judgment tier rather than closing entirely.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Faculty ownership of AI-use adjudication: campus academic-integrity policies (already being rewritten at most US universities) that assign the language instructor as the fact-finder on whether submitted work was machine-translated, with authority to fail or refer. Language faculty are uniquely positioned as the only competent judges of translation provenance.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Court and immigration interpretation/translation certification tied to teaching faculty — state court interpreter boards and ATA certification create signature-and-liability roles, but this attaches to the translator credential, not the professorship. A route only where faculty also hold the certifying role.", "plausibility": "unlikely", "would_add": 1 } ], "ceiling_note": "Every lever here raises per-survivor scores while doing nothing about the enrollment collapse that actually ends jobs. A department cut to two lines can have a higher resistance score and 80% fewer workers; the register does not measure headcount." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 27240, "wage": 65010 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 25590, "wage": 67640 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 24860, "wage": 69990 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 22790, "wage": 69920 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 19640, "wage": 77030 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 19520, "wage": 76030 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 20820, "wage": 78760 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 21170, "wage": 77010 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 19830, "wage": 79350 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -27.2, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "anthropology-and-archeology-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Anthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 51, "median_wage": 99650, "overlap": 79, "skills_to_close": [ "Science", "Speaking", "Reading Comprehension", "Time Management" ] }, { "slug": "art-drama-and-music-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 78620, "overlap": 77, "skills_to_close": [ "Management of Financial Resources", "Time Management", "Speaking" ] }, { "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": 74, "skills_to_close": [ "Coordination", "Mathematics", "Management of Financial Resources", "Social Perceptiveness" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }