{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/nursing-instructors-and-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": "Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary",
    "soc_code": "25-1072",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 77960,
    "median_annual_wage": 80250
  },
  "verdict": "SAFE",
  "risk_resistance": 71,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 13,
    "embodiment": 14,
    "liability_shield": 14,
    "trust_premium": 15,
    "judgment_accountability": 15
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "A 13 rather than a 16 reflects that lecture prep, NCLEX-style item writing, care-plan case studies, and skills-checkoff paperwork are genuinely draftable by machine, while direct supervision of eight students on a med-surg unit — catching a wrong insulin draw before it reaches the patient, coaching a first sterile Foley insertion, running a mock code in the sim lab and debriefing it — has no digital substitute.",
    "embodiment": "Clinical rotations put you on hospital floors, in ORs and OB suites, in long-term care, standing for eight- to twelve-hour shifts under the same infection-control, lifting, and needle-stick conditions as staff nurses, plus hands-on sim-lab work positioning manikins and demonstrating on real bodies; it lands at 14 rather than 18 because a meaningful share of the week is still classroom and office.",
    "liability_shield": "You must hold an active RN licence (usually MSN or doctorate) to be faculty at all, your licence is on the line when a student under your supervision harms a patient, and state boards plus ACEN/CCNE dictate clinical group size caps — a 14 rather than 18 because the facility and the employing college absorb much of the malpractice exposure and you rarely sign as the patient's nurse of record.",
    "trust_premium": "Students choose to disclose that they froze in a code, ask you to be the reference that gets them hired, and rely on your read of their readiness during remediation conversations; the 15 acknowledges that this mentoring relationship is inseparable from the teaching, though didactic lecture sections and adjunct-taught courses run on less of it.",
    "judgment_accountability": "You decide whether a student who made a medication error is remediated or failed out, whether someone is safe to progress to preceptorship, and whether to pull a student off an assignment mid-shift — gatekeeping calls with a patient-safety consequence and an appeal-and-due-process trail, sitting at 15 because program handbooks and clinical evaluation tools structure the decision even when the facts are ambiguous."
  },
  "rationale": "Roughly half of this job is content work AI already does well — lecture slides, syllabi, test-item banks, case scenarios, rubric drafts, accreditation report prose. The other half is standing on a hospital floor watching a student push a medication and deciding in real time whether it is safe, then owning the pass/fail call that determines who enters the profession. State boards of nursing and accreditors (ACEN/CCNE) require licensed RNs with graduate degrees as faculty and cap clinical student-to-instructor ratios, which is a hard regulatory floor on headcount.",
  "outlook": "Chronic faculty shortages plus accreditation ratio rules keep hiring strong through the 2030s, but AI absorbs didactic content production, so the job tilts further toward clinical supervision, simulation, and student evaluation.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "State boards of nursing tightening faculty rules so that clinical supervision ratios (commonly 1:8-1:10) are written as hard caps with named, licensed instructor-of-record attestation per student per rotation — and explicit language that AI/simulation platforms cannot substitute for the supervising RN's signature on competency validation. NCSBN's model rules and periodic state board revisions are the visible venue; several states already require a named faculty member of record for each clinical group.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Accreditor (ACEN/CCNE) standards revised to require faculty attestation that AI-generated test items, rubrics, and simulated case content were reviewed by a qualified nurse educator before use in high-stakes evaluation — moving AI output into a countersign regime rather than a free substitute.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift: once slide decks, item banks, syllabi and accreditation prose are drafted by AI as a matter of course, the residual job concentrates on bedside observation, remediation of failing students, and defensible pass/fail documentation — the tier that carries litigation risk. This raises task_resistance without any new rule, and is already visible in nursing programs adopting AI content generation while clinical hours stay untouched.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Continued growth in student due-process litigation over clinical dismissal (a live and expanding area in nursing programs) making the documented, individually-owned failure decision the legally load-bearing act, with faculty deposed as the decision-maker. If institutions respond by formalizing a named-faculty adjudication role rather than committee diffusion, this rises.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "embodiment",
        "change": "State board caps on the share of clinical hours substitutable by simulation (many states cap at 25-50% post-NCSBN simulation study) being held or tightened rather than relaxed, keeping a floor of physical hospital-floor supervision hours per student.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Trust premium has no realistic route up: the buyer is a program administrator managing a documented faculty shortage and cost pressure, not a student choosing a human teacher. Faculty vacancy rates create pressure in the opposite direction — toward waivers, larger ratios, and more simulation substitution — so the liability and embodiment levers here are as likely to be loosened as tightened."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 55580,
        "wage": 71260
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 55710,
        "wage": 73490
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 59680,
        "wage": 74600
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 61100,
        "wage": 75470
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 68060,
        "wage": 77440
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 69190,
        "wage": 78580
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 72700,
        "wage": 80780
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 74250,
        "wage": 79940
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 77960,
        "wage": 80250
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 40.3,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}