{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/geography-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": "Geography Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1064", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 3330, "median_annual_wage": 97590 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 48, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 9, "liability_shield": 4, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Roughly half the workload — GIS lab troubleshooting when a projection fails mid-exercise, running a field methods week with GPS units and soil augers, defending a thesis proposal with a committee, reading a student's confused mental map and diagnosing why — has no text-output substitute, while the intro-course scaffolding of lecture notes, quiz banks and map-reading worksheets already does, which is what pins this at 11 rather than up with lab scientists or down with content writers.", "embodiment": "Field camp, campus watershed walks, hauling total stations and Trimble units outdoors, and standing over a student's shoulder at an ArcGIS workstation are real physical duties, but they are a few weeks and a few lab hours per term against a base of lecturing, screen-based mapping and committee work — a 9, not the 15 of a field geologist who lives in the terrain.", "liability_shield": "No state licence, no board exam, no professional registry gates who teaches human geography — a PhD and a departmental hiring vote are the only entry controls, and GISP certification is optional and unenforced even for the GIS courses, so nothing in law requires a credentialed human to deliver the content.", "trust_premium": "At 14 because the durable value is the named relationship: students choose a thesis advisor, ask for the letter of recommendation that gets them into a planning MA or a federal GIS post, and return years later for the reference — the lecture content is fungible, the advisor's signature and knowledge of that student's work is not.", "judgment_accountability": "Grading a contested essay on political borders, setting curriculum for an accreditation review, deciding whether a student's fieldwork is publishable, and calling safety judgments on a field trip are genuine discretion, but they sit inside departmental grading policies, catalogue requirements and IRB review rather than being unappealable high-stakes calls — hence 10, mid-band." }, "rationale": "Lecture writing, slide decks, syllabus construction, quiz banks, reading summaries and first-pass essay feedback are all things current models do at usable quality, and much of an intro human/physical geography course is exactly that. What persists is live classroom facilitation, GIS and remote-sensing lab supervision, field methods instruction, thesis advising and the institutional judgment of grading and curriculum design. The bigger near-term threat to this 3,300-person occupation is departmental consolidation and enrollment decline in small geography programs, which AI-assisted course delivery accelerates rather than causes.", "outlook": "By 2035 fewer standalone geography departments exist, and the surviving faculty are the ones anchored to GIS/geospatial labs, field instruction and applied program partnerships rather than lecture-hall survey courses.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "If intro survey lecturing is largely absorbed by AI-assisted/asynchronous delivery, the residual job becomes GIS/remote-sensing lab supervision, field camp instruction, thesis and capstone advising, and IRB-adjacent research design — tiers current models cannot deliver. This is a task-mix shift requiring no new rule, and is visible in how surviving geography programs already reposition around GIScience labs rather than survey courses.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "If accreditors or state systems adopt rules that credit-bearing courses must have documented substantive faculty interaction (the federal 'regular and substantive interaction' standard for distance education, already enforced in Title IV audits), the assessable-by-AI portion cannot be counted as instruction.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "If departments shift required credits toward field methods (surveying, GPS/drone data collection, soil and stream sampling) and field camps as the program's differentiator against online competitors, the share of the workload occurring in unpredictable outdoor environments rises.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "If institutions market small-cohort, in-person instruction as the paid-for distinction — and if faculty union contracts (e.g. AAUP/AFT chapters that have bargained AI clauses limiting course delivery by machine, as in the 2024 CSU and Rutgers negotiations) restrict AI-only sections — students and parents are explicitly buying human instruction.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "If academic-integrity policy makes the instructor of record the accountable decider on AI-use allegations, with appealable findings and personal documentation duties, grading judgment becomes a consequential contested call rather than a scoring task.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Narrow route only: if faculty teaching GIS toward professional certification (GISP, or state surveying/mapping licensure paths where geospatial coursework is credited) must be individually credentialed and sign competency attestations, a licensure hook appears for that subset.", "plausibility": "unlikely", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "No lever addresses the dominant risk: program closure from enrollment decline and departmental merger into environmental science or earth systems. A geography teacher can score well on every dimension and still lose the line item when the major is discontinued. Liability shielding is structurally weak — postsecondary teaching has no signature requirement and no personal liability, and nothing in motion changes that." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 3980, "wage": 78040 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 3960, "wage": 80350 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 3970, "wage": 80520 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 3720, "wage": 82330 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 3440, "wage": 81440 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 3340, "wage": 81920 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 3480, "wage": 85600 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 3290, "wage": 86730 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 3330, "wage": 97590 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -16.3, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "forestry-and-conservation-science-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Forestry and Conservation Science Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 101420, "overlap": 75, "skills_to_close": [ "Operation and Control", "Monitoring", "Quality Control Analysis", "Operations Monitoring" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }