{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/physics-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": "Physics Teachers, Postsecondary",
    "soc_code": "25-1054",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 13090,
    "median_annual_wage": 100310
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 51,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 12,
    "embodiment": 10,
    "liability_shield": 3,
    "trust_premium": 14,
    "judgment_accountability": 12
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "At 12 rather than 6, the tasks that resist are the ones that happen with a student in front of you — watching someone set up an interferometer wrong and knowing whether to intervene, reading a confused derivation on a whiteboard mid-office-hour, advising a senior thesis on a problem with no textbook answer — but the bulk-hours work of writing lecture notes on Gauss's law, generating and grading Physics 101 problem sets, and building the syllabus is now near-instant output, which is what keeps this out of the 14+ band.",
    "embodiment": "A 10 reflects that the lecture hall and grading queue are screen-substitutable, but lab sections are not: aligning optics on a rail, checking that a student wired a scope probe to ground and not to the 120V side, calibrating force sensors, and enforcing laser and radiation-source safety are hands-on in a room where students break things, and machine-shop or cryogenics access in research supervision pushes it higher than pure classroom teaching would.",
    "liability_shield": "There is no state physics-teaching licence at the postsecondary level — the credential is a PhD and a department hiring committee, and an institution can and does staff the same PC1010 section with an adjunct, a postdoc, or a graduate TA, so the 3 reflects that nothing statutory prevents substituting who or what delivers the course.",
    "trust_premium": "14 is earned in the specific relationships that carry weight beyond the transcript: the letter of recommendation for graduate school that admissions committees actually read, the research advisor a student names when they publish, and the office-hours history that decides whether a struggling sophomore stays in the major — though the 500-person intro survey course, where most enrolled students never speak to you, keeps it out of the high teens.",
    "judgment_accountability": "At 12, the discretionary calls are real and unappealed — deciding whether a lab report shows fabricated data, setting a curve that determines who fails and loses financial aid, judging whether an undergraduate is ready to run an experiment unsupervised — but the accreditation-driven learning outcomes, departmental common finals, and appeals processes bound those decisions in a way that keeps them below the 14+ band."
  },
  "rationale": "Lecture drafting, problem-set generation, worked solutions, and syllabus writing are already commodity AI output, and intro-physics content is the most thoroughly pre-solved material on the internet. What holds is the embodied part: running lab sections with real optics benches and oscilloscopes, diagnosing why a student's mental model of angular momentum is wrong in real time, and supervising undergraduate research. The real pressure on this occupation is structural — enrollment shifts, large-section consolidation, and adjunct staffing — more than a model replacing a professor outright.",
  "outlook": "Physics faculty will still be teaching labs and mentoring researchers in ten years, but intro-course sections get larger and more AI-supported, and the growth is in lab-heavy and research-supervision roles rather than lecture-delivery headcount.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "If content delivery (lecture, problem sets, worked solutions) is fully offloaded to AI/OER and the remaining assigned load becomes lab supervision, oral exams, and research mentoring, the residual job is the judgment tier. Watch for departments formally restructuring intro courses into 'studio physics'/SCALE-UP models where contact hours are lab and coaching rather than lecture — already done at NC State, MIT TEAL, and spreading via AAPT.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "embodiment",
        "change": "If accreditation or program review makes hands-on wet-lab hours non-substitutable — e.g. ABET-accredited engineering physics sequences and state articulation agreements refusing to accept simulation-only lab credit, as several state systems tightened after the 2020-21 remote-lab expansion — the lab-supervision core becomes a fixed physical requirement.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "If a visible tier of students/parents pays specifically for small-section human instruction as a differentiator (liberal-arts colleges marketing 'no AI-taught courses', faculty-senate policies requiring disclosure when course content is AI-generated — such disclosure resolutions have already been passed at several campuses), the human-taught section becomes the priced product.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "If institutions make faculty the named accountable party for AI-assisted grading and academic-integrity determinations — e.g. honor-code rules requiring a human instructor of record to personally adjudicate AI-detection flags and sign the sanction, plus radiation/laser safety officer responsibility for undergrad lab and research supervision under state and NRC/OSHA rules — the role owns consequential calls with personal exposure.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "If radiation-source and Class 3B/4 laser licensing requires a named, credentialed responsible individual per NRC/Agreement-State rules for teaching labs, that creates a narrow personal-signature requirement — but it attaches to a designated safety officer, not to physics faculty generally, so the route is real but small.",
        "plausibility": "unlikely",
        "would_add": 1
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "The binding constraint is budgetary, not technical: large-section consolidation and adjunctification cut headcount regardless of how high these dimensions go. Raising task_resistance and judgment_accountability protects the work but not the number of jobs."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 13710,
        "wage": 87340
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 13730,
        "wage": 90800
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 13780,
        "wage": 89590
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 13670,
        "wage": 90400
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 12460,
        "wage": 93070
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 12860,
        "wage": 86550
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 14030,
        "wage": 98020
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 13590,
        "wage": 97360
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 13090,
        "wage": 100310
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": -4.5,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}