{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/social-sciences-teachers-postsecondary-all-other/",
  "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": "Social Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary, All Other",
    "soc_code": "25-1069",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 16580,
    "median_annual_wage": 72990
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 45,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 8,
    "embodiment": 8,
    "liability_shield": 5,
    "trust_premium": 14,
    "judgment_accountability": 10
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Roughly half the workload — building the syllabus, generating lecture slides and quiz banks, summarizing assigned readings, grading short essays against a rubric, answering routine emails and moderating discussion boards — is already producible at passing quality by a model, and only the live seminar, thesis supervision, and defensible grade decisions push it up to 8 rather than into the bottom band.",
    "embodiment": "Being physically in a room matters — projecting to a 60-seat lecture hall, catching the student who has checked out, running a field methods exercise or an archive/community-site visit — but the environment is a scheduled campus classroom, not an uncontrolled one, so this sits mid-range rather than at desk-only 8.",
    "liability_shield": "No state licence gates the title: hiring turns on a PhD and departmental vote, and legal exposure for a bad grade or a Title IX or FERPA matter lands on the institution, not your personal credential — the 5 reflects the terminal degree and accreditation/SACS-type faculty-qualification rules that still make a human of record necessary on paper.",
    "trust_premium": "Students choose your section, come to office hours, ask you to chair a thesis committee and write the letter that gets them into a PhD program — that letter is worth something only because your name and reputation are on it, which is why this is the highest of the five scores.",
    "judgment_accountability": "You decide what counts as a defensible argument, whether an assignment is plagiarized or AI-written, whether a student passes, and how to handle politically charged material in class — real discretion with consequences for individuals, but bounded by departmental learning outcomes, grade appeals, and curriculum committees, which caps it at 10 instead of the high band."
  },
  "rationale": "The paper-and-screen half of this job — lecture decks, syllabi, reading summaries, literature reviews, quiz banks, rubric-based essay grading, discussion-board moderation — is exactly what current models do at usable quality, and asynchronous online sections are where that substitution bites first. What holds is the live seminar: reading a room, pushing a student past a sloppy argument in real time, advising theses, writing credible recommendation letters, and owning grades that carry institutional weight. The real threat to this occupation is not a bot replacing a professor but budget-driven consolidation of course sections and continued shift to adjunct labor, with AI as the excuse.",
  "outlook": "Fewer tenure-track lines and larger, more automated intro sections, with surviving roles concentrated in seminar teaching, thesis supervision, and program governance.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift: if deck-building, quiz banks and first-pass essay grading are conceded to AI, what remains is live seminar facilitation, thesis supervision, IRB-adjacent research mentoring and oral defense examination — genuinely two-tier work. Accreditor rules pushing this direction already exist in draft form (e.g., regional accreditors requiring documented 'regular and substantive interaction' by faculty of record for Title IV distance-ed eligibility, 34 CFR 600.2).",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "If the Department of Education's 'regular and substantive interaction' standard is enforced with named faculty of record personally attested per section — and if state authorization boards or accreditors begin sanctioning institutions for AI-delivered instruction without a credentialed instructor signing off on grades and academic integrity findings — the signature becomes non-delegable.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Academic integrity adjudication: if institutions formally require a human faculty member to make and defend the final determination on AI-plagiarism allegations (appealable, FERPA-bound, sometimes litigated), the role owns consequential calls under genuine ambiguity. Several universities have already barred detector output as sole evidence, forcing human judgment.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Narrow route only: small-cohort seminar and thesis supervision marketed explicitly as human-taught, plus recommendation letters that graduate programs and employers accept only from a named human. If professional and graduate admissions bodies formally refuse AI-generated or AI-assisted letters, that specific human-attested artifact holds value.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Every lever here protects the faculty line, not the headcount. None of them counteract the actual mechanism named in the description: section consolidation and adjunctification. A rule requiring one credentialed human per course is compatible with that human teaching four times as many students at adjunct pay. Trust premium is also structurally capped — students buy a credential from an institution, not a professor, and for the non-elite institutions where most of these 16,580 jobs sit there is no realistic route to a high human-taught premium."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2017,
        "emp": 16580,
        "wage": 64480
      },
      {
        "y": 2018,
        "emp": 17670,
        "wage": 71600
      },
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 16830,
        "wage": 71530
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 17620,
        "wage": 69340
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 16140,
        "wage": 77500
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 16200,
        "wage": 75390
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 16900,
        "wage": 77750
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 17540,
        "wage": 75040
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 16580,
        "wage": 72990
      }
    ],
    "from": 2017,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 0,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": true
  },
  "pivots": [],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}