EXPOSED
This is a catch-all bucket for college instructors outside the named disciplines — the modal worker builds syllabi, delivers lectures, grades written work, and advises students, often off the tenure track. Slide decks, lecture outlines, quiz banks, rubric-based grading, and feedback drafts are already competently generated by AI, and no license protects the role; what holds is live classroom presence, mentorship students actually pay tuition for, and accountability for what a cohort learns. The real threat is institutional: enrollment pressure plus AI-assisted course production shrinks section counts and consolidates adjunct lines faster than it eliminates the job outright.
Most of this decline happened after 2021 — it is not the pandemic dip.
Median pay $68,970 → $77,640 -9.9% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+1.8%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 149,840 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +1.8% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 46/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~13,500 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
TeacherLecturerInstructorFaculty MemberFlight TeacherBraille TeacherCollege TeacherScience TeacherAdjunct InstructorCollege InstructorHumanities TeacherUniversity TeacherAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorPackaging ProfessorLiberal Arts TeacherMetal Crafts TeacherUniversity ProfessorCity Planning TeacherNaval Science TeacherUrban Planning TeacherForeign Service TeacherIndustrial Arts TeacherInterior Design Teacher
The BLS uses Postsecondary Teachers, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Lecture prep, quiz banks, and rubric-scored essay feedback — the bulk of a 3/3 or 4/4 load — are already drafted competently by a model, but running a live seminar discussion, reading when a room has lost the thread, and calibrating a cohort's midterm results into next week's plan still require a person in the room, which is what keeps this at 10 rather than down in the automatable band.
Some physical or field component Teaching bodies are in physical classrooms — proctoring exams, running a lab or studio section, holding in-person office hours, moving between campuses on adjunct schedules — but the environment is a controlled, scheduled room with predictable equipment, so this sits at 9 rather than in the field-work range where conditions are uncontrolled.
No licence, no signature requirement No state license, board exam, or continuing-education requirement gates who teaches an interdisciplinary or general-studies course; the institution's accreditation and the department chair carry the credentialing weight, and adjunct appointments are frequently made on a master's degree plus a semester-by-semester contract, which is why this is a 3 and not a 0 — degree requirements exist, they just protect nobody's job.
Meaningful discretion You decide what counts as evidence in a paper, whether a plagiarism case goes to the academic integrity board, whether a struggling student gets an incomplete or a failing grade that affects their aid eligibility — real discretion with consequences, but bounded by department-approved learning outcomes, appeal processes, and grade-distribution norms, which holds it at 10 rather than the ownership-of-ambiguity band.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (10/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (14/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (10/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 27 of this occupation's 46 points (59%).
Embodiment (9/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 64/100, still EXPOSED.
Collective bargaining language (already appearing in CFA, PSC-CUNY, and Rutgers AAUP-AFT contracts and the 2023 WGA-style AI clauses) requiring that AI cannot be the instructor of record, that course materials authored by faculty cannot be used to train or generate replacement sections without consent, and that section caps not be raised on the basis of AI assistance. This is contractual rather than licensure, but functions as a shield on displacement.
Academic integrity regimes that put the instructor personally on the hook for AI-misconduct determinations — where a faculty member must make and defend a finding that carries a student's degree, subject to due-process appeal and litigation (students have already sued over AI-detector accusations). If institutional policy formally assigns that adjudication to the instructor rather than a central office, the consequential-call weight rises.
Accreditor rules that make a named, credentialed instructor of record legally responsible for AI-generated course content and grades — e.g. SACSCOC/HLC 'faculty of record' and regular-and-substantive-interaction (RSI) standards under the Department of Education's distance-education rules being enforced against AI-taught sections, so an institution loses Title IV eligibility if no human faculty member owns the course. State authorization audits citing RSI violations for AI-delivered courses would be the checkable event.
Task-mix shift: if lecture production, quiz banks, and first-pass feedback are fully automated, the residual role is oral examination, studio/seminar facilitation, live assessment designed to be AI-resistant, and individualized mentoring. Watch for institutions formally redesigning assessment toward proctored oral defenses and in-person performance — that raises the share of the day AI cannot do, even as headcount falls.
Enrollment-marketing shift where selective institutions advertise guaranteed human-taught small sections and faculty-student ratios as the differentiator against low-cost AI-delivered competitors, with tuition tiers to match. Checkable if catalogs or state disclosure rules require labeling which sections are AI-delivered.
The limit. The binding constraint is budgetary, not technical: no lever here stops section consolidation or adjunct non-renewal, and every gain above is institution-dependent rather than licensure-backed. Absent a real credential monopoly, liability_shield has a low ceiling and headcount can fall even as the remaining job gets harder to automate.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 14,070 | $105,640 +36% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 4,240 | $100,080 +29% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 4,190 | $82,620 +6% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 3,480 | $101,820 +31% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 3,130 | $94,690 +22% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 3,020 | $99,240 +28% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 2,630 | $77,570 +0% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 2,500 | $73,490 -5% |
| Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA | 2,070 | $135,060 +74% |
| Shreveport-Bossier City, LA | 670 | $113,550 +46% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 14,070 | $105,640 +36% |
National University of Singapore · University of Cincinnati · Penn State University · UCLA · State University of New York · Purdue University · University of North Carolina Wilmington
TNGlobal reported that the National University of Singapore expanded its collaboration with OpenAI to provide all students and staff access to ChatGPT and Codex.
Malay Mail reports the National University of Singapore has made AI courses compulsory for all students and provided free ChatGPT access to students and staff.
The National University of Singapore announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to apply AI across teaching, research and administrative functions.
The Straits Times reports that the National University of Singapore has made AI courses compulsory for students and is providing free ChatGPT Edu access across the university.
SUNY and the United University Professions union announced a contract agreement that includes salary increases and provisions covering the use of AI affecting academic staff.
CalMatters reports California State University faculty are seeking contract protections against AI tools replacing instructional work while campuses and staff experiment with such tools.
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