{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/history-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": "History Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1125", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 18790, "median_annual_wage": 83820 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 47, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 9, "embodiment": 8, "liability_shield": 6, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Grading 60 identical Western Civ essays against a rubric, assembling a syllabus from a canonical reading list, and writing multiple-choice exam banks on the Treaty of Westphalia are already machine work, which pins this below the midpoint — but the seminar where you make eighteen-year-olds defend a claim about a primary source, and the dissertation chapter you argue with line by line, are not, which keeps it from falling to 5.", "embodiment": "Standing in a lecture hall, handling archival material and rare-book collections in reading rooms, and running site or museum visits are genuine bodily components, but they happen in climate-controlled rooms with no manual dexterity or safety exposure, which caps this near the low end of the mid-band.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates who teaches Reconstruction to undergraduates; the PhD and departmental hiring committee are the only gates, and accreditation obligations attach to the institution and the credit hour, not to you personally, so you carry credential friction without personal legal liability.", "trust_premium": "Students choose your section, come to office hours, ask you for the letter of recommendation that decides their grad school application, and stay in your advising orbit for years — that named, cumulative relationship is most of what the tuition buys, and it is why a recorded lecture library has never emptied the room.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide what counts as evidence, whether a paper is plagiarised, what grade closes a student's GPA, and how to teach contested historiography — real discretion with real consequences for individuals, but bounded by department curricula, grade-appeal procedures, and Title IX and FERPA reporting channels rather than owned outright." }, "rationale": "The text-heavy core of this job — lecture notes, syllabi, reading guides, essay feedback, literature summaries, exam question banks — is exactly what current language models produce at usable quality, and students already use the same tools on the other side of the desk. What resists is the live seminar: running a room where undergraduates argue about evidence, teaching source criticism by watching a student misread a document and correcting them in real time, and advising thesis work. The bigger near-term threat is not AI replacing historians but humanities enrollment decline and adjunctification shrinking the tenure-track base; the modal worker here is increasingly contingent faculty teaching survey courses.", "outlook": "The seminar and thesis-advising tier persists at selective institutions, but survey-course teaching loads consolidate into fewer, larger sections with AI-assisted grading, and total headcount keeps drifting down with humanities enrollment.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Accreditors or state systems requiring that courses marketed as 'in-person' or 'seminar' be taught synchronously by a human of record, and institutions advertising small-enrollment human-led discussion sections as a tuition differentiator (already visible in liberal-arts colleges' marketing and in AAUP/faculty-senate fights over AI-generated course content at e.g. Boise State, Cal State's system-wide ChatGPT rollout backlash)", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift as generative writing collapses take-home essays: if departments move assessment to oral examination, in-class handwritten blue-book exams, viva-style thesis defense, and archival/primary-source work with physical or paywalled collections, the remaining day is judgment-tier teaching that current models cannot deliver. This is already in motion in UK/Australian universities reintroducing oral and invigilated assessment", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Faculty being made the accountable decision-maker in academic-integrity adjudication for AI use — where the instructor's determination, not a detector score, is the finding of record, appealable through a human process. Several universities' honor-code revisions (e.g. Vanderbilt disabling Turnitin's AI detector) already push the consequential call back onto the instructor", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Accreditation rules (SACSCOC, HLC) tightening 'qualified faculty' and regular-and-substantive-interaction requirements for Title IV eligibility so that a credentialed human must be instructor of record for credit-bearing history courses, with AI-only sections ineligible for federal aid — a live question in Department of Education RSI guidance for distance education", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "The binding constraint here is not capability but demand: humanities enrollment decline and adjunctification shrink the base regardless of how these dimensions move. A higher trust premium for human-taught seminars mostly accrues to tenure-track faculty at well-resourced institutions, not to the modal contingent survey-course instructor, who is displaced by section consolidation rather than by a model." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 21120, "wage": 72690 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 20510, "wage": 74590 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 21030, "wage": 75170 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 20450, "wage": 76890 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 18590, "wage": 78130 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 18250, "wage": 79400 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 20610, "wage": 82140 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 19860, "wage": 81500 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 18790, "wage": 83820 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -11, "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": 83, "skills_to_close": [ "Technology Design", "Programming" ] }, { "slug": "art-drama-and-music-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 78620, "overlap": 82, "skills_to_close": [ "Technology Design" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }