EXPOSED
Most of the workweek — building Intro Psych lecture decks, writing quiz banks, summarizing literature, grading short-answer and essay responses, drafting feedback — is exactly what language models now do at usable quality, and enrollment-driven institutions are already consolidating large gateway sections around shared AI-assisted content. What survives is live seminar facilitation, supervising undergrad research and IRB protocols, clinical/practicum mentoring, and being the person a struggling 19-year-old actually talks to. The modal worker here is not a tenured researcher but a full-time instructor or adjunct teaching high-volume intro sections, which is the most exposed tier; there is no license, only credential and accreditation requirements.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $76,620 → $80,340 -16.1% 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
+3.6%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 41,530 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 +3.6% 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.
~4,000 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
TeacherLecturerProfessorInstructorFaculty MemberAdjunct ProfessorCollege ProfessorAdjunct InstructorAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorPsychology LecturerPsychology ProfessorPsychology InstructorCollege Faculty MemberHuman Relations TeacherChild Psychology TeacherChild Development TeacherHuman Relations ProfessorPsychology Faculty MemberUniversity Faculty MemberApplied Psychology TeacherAbnormal Psychology TeacherChild Development ProfessorClinical Psychology Teacher
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Roughly half the load — 200-seat Intro Psych lectures on classical conditioning, multiple-choice item banks, textbook-aligned slide decks, rubric-scored essays on the Milgram studies — is standardized content a model reproduces at passing quality, while the surviving half (running a live seminar where students argue about replication failures, sitting with an undergrad thesis student through IRB revisions, calibrating a practicum evaluation) still requires a present human, which is why this lands at 9 rather than in the resistant teens.
Some physical or field component Teaching happens in a physical room on a fixed schedule with office hours, proctored exams, and hands-on rat/human-subject labs or EEG and eye-tracking demos in some programs, but nothing here is manual work in an uncontrolled setting — the 8 reflects place-bound presence, not physical skill, and the growing share of asynchronous online sections pulls it no higher.
Certification preferred, not legally required A PhD or master's plus regional accreditation and departmental hiring standards is the whole gate — no state board licenses postsecondary psychology instruction, no one revokes a credential over a bad lecture, and the 5 rather than 0 is earned only by HLC/SACSCOC faculty-qualification rules and, for those supervising clinical practica, APA program accreditation standards that require credentialed supervisors.
Meaningful discretion Grade appeals, academic-integrity referrals, deciding whether a student's disclosure triggers a Title IX or care-team report, and judging when an undergraduate protocol crosses into human-subjects risk are consequential calls, but they run through university procedures, appeals committees, and IRB review rather than resting on the instructor alone — hence 10, not the high-teens of someone who owns the final unappealable decision.
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 (9/20 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 (5/20) 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 29 of this occupation's 46 points (63%).
Embodiment (8/20) 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 60/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: if intro-section deck building, quiz banks and first-pass essay grading are fully absorbed by institutional AI, the residual job is IRB protocol review, undergrad thesis supervision, live seminar facilitation and oral/defense assessment — genuinely a second tier here. Reinforced if institutions respond to AI-written student work by moving to oral exams, in-class proctored work and supervised research, all human-invigilated.
Accreditor or state authorization rules that make a credentialed faculty member of record personally accountable for assessment integrity and grade assignment — e.g. SACSCOC/HLC 'faculty qualifications and responsibility for curriculum' standards being enforced against AI-generated course content, or state distance-ed rules barring AI-only instruction of record. Also APA-accredited program requirements that clinical/practicum supervision hours be signed by a licensed psychologist, which already binds the supervision-heavy slice of this SOC.
Formal ownership of consequential calls: named-instructor responsibility in academic-integrity hearings over AI use, Title IX/mandatory-reporter duties, and CARE-team referral of students disclosing suicidality in class — plus IRB member/protocol-advisor sign-off on undergraduate human-subjects research.
Small-college and honors-program marketing that contractually caps section size and guarantees human-taught seminars, and faculty-union contract language limiting class size or barring AI as instructor of record (already bargained by CFA, Rutgers AAUP-AFT and several CC locals).
The limit. Ceiling is low for the modal worker: the adjunct teaching 300-seat online Intro Psych captures almost none of these levers, since supervision, IRB and seminar work concentrate in tenure-line and clinical faculty. Enrollment economics push the other way, and no licensure exists to anchor a shield.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 3,950 | $102,740 +28% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,830 | $101,980 +27% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 1,690 | $82,930 +3% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 1,620 | $77,860 -3% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 860 | $77,840 -3% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 710 | $100,980 +26% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 690 | $77,430 -4% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 680 | $77,980 -3% |
| Ann Arbor, MI | 140 | $142,840 +78% |
| Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 400 | $137,810 +72% |
| Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA | 230 | $133,880 +67% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 46. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.