{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/social-work-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": "Social Work Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1113", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 12610, "median_annual_wage": 77570 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 56, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 9, "liability_shield": 8, "trust_premium": 16, "judgment_accountability": 12 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "At 11 the split is visible inside a single course load: the asynchronous MSW theory section — recorded lectures, discussion-board prompts, APA-formatted paper feedback against a rubric — is largely reproducible now, while the practicum seminar, the process-recording debrief where you catch a student's countertransference, and the site visit with a field instructor and agency supervisor are not, which is why this sits above the 6-and-below tier but nowhere near the 14+ of hands-on trades.", "embodiment": "A 9 reflects that most hours are screen or seminar-room work, but the field-liaison duty puts you in county child-welfare offices, hospital units, shelters and community mental-health clinics on unpredictable schedules, and live role-plays and simulated client interviews require your body in the room reading affect and posture — physical presence that matters, without the environmental hazard exposure that pushes scores past 13.", "liability_shield": "The 8 is the gap between credential and licence: a doctorate or MSW plus CSWE-mandated post-MSW practice experience is required to teach practice courses, and many field directors hold an active LCSW/LMSW, but no state licences you to lecture, the accreditation obligation attaches to the program rather than your name, and when a practicum student harms a client it is the agency's supervising social worker and the institution — not your personal licence — that answers.", "trust_premium": "The 16 comes from the fact that students disclose their own trauma histories in your practice classes, ask you to write the letter that gets them a clinical job, and take your gatekeeping judgment about their fitness for practice as career-defining — a multi-year advising and supervisory relationship that is the actual pedagogical mechanism, not a wrapper around content delivery.", "judgment_accountability": "At 12 you own genuinely ambiguous calls — whether a student with a boundary violation at a field placement should be remediated, removed, or reported; how to handle a disclosure of impairment; what to do when an agency's practice conflicts with the NASW Code — but those decisions run through committees, academic-appeals procedures and program handbooks, so you rarely bear the final unilateral judgment that puts a role at 14 or above." }, "rationale": "Lecture prep, syllabus writing, case-vignette creation, rubric grading and reading-response feedback are already within reach of current AI, and much of the online-delivery tier of this job is exactly that work. What holds is the licensure-adjacent core: supervising field practicum students, evaluating whether a student is fit for client-facing practice, gatekeeping for CSWE-accredited programs, and modeling clinical presence in role-plays and process recordings. The modal worker here is a teaching-heavy faculty member (often part contingent), so the bigger near-term threat is enrollment and budget pressure, with AI accelerating the squeeze on the lecture-and-grade tier.", "outlook": "Course content production gets largely automated and the online adjunct tier thins, while field-education coordinators, clinical supervisors, and accreditation leads keep their seats through 2035.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "CSWE's EPAS accreditation standards (next revision cycle after 2022) tightening field-education language to require a named, MSW-credentialed faculty liaison of record to personally sign off on each student's field competency determination and hours attestation — mirroring how state boards already require identified licensed supervisors for post-MSW supervision hours. If signature-of-record plus program-accountability for gatekeeping decisions becomes explicit, the field-coordinating faculty role becomes non-delegable.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Litigation from a dismissed student or from a client harmed by an unfit placed student that establishes program/faculty duty-of-care in gatekeeping decisions, prompting university insurers to require documented licensed-human review of every student removal or advancement decision.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Task-mix shift: as lecture drafting, rubric grading and reading-response feedback are absorbed by institutional AI tools, the residual load concentrates in the genuinely ambiguous calls — fitness-to-practice determinations, mandated-reporting instruction with real disclosures in class, remediation plans, and managing agency conflicts in practicum. This is a real two-tier job and the judgment tier is already the accreditation-protected part.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "State licensure boards (e.g. via ASWB) crediting only synchronous, human-supervised clinical skills instruction toward pre-licensure practice hours, so role-play, process recording review and live clinical-presence modeling cannot be delivered asynchronously or AI-mediated.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Already near ceiling: MSW applicants and field agencies select on named clinical faculty and supervision quality. Marginal further rise only if accreditors or employers begin publicly reporting human-supervision ratios per program.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 1 } ], "ceiling_note": "None of these touch the dominant threat: enrollment decline and the substitution of tenure-line faculty with contingent instructors. Accreditation levers can protect the field-education and gatekeeping role — perhaps a few thousand positions — while the lecture-and-grade tier that most of these 12,610 workers actually staff shrinks regardless. Embodiment has no realistic route above single digits." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 56, 56 ], "run_verdicts": [ "EXPOSED", "EXPOSED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 12430, "wage": 64370 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 12620, "wage": 68300 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 13640, "wage": 72070 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 13580, "wage": 71570 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 12280, "wage": 71010 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 12050, "wage": 66510 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 11730, "wage": 75020 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 13350, "wage": 76210 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 12610, "wage": 77570 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 1.4, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "secondary-school-teachers-except-special-and-career-technical-education", "title": "Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 69, "median_wage": 72040, "overlap": 85, "skills_to_close": [ "Quality Control Analysis" ] }, { "slug": "special-education-teachers-secondary-school", "title": "Special Education Teachers, Secondary School", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 73, "median_wage": 74260, "overlap": 85, "skills_to_close": [ "Service Orientation", "Time Management" ] }, { "slug": "clinical-and-counseling-psychologists", "title": "Clinical and Counseling Psychologists", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 71, "median_wage": 100580, "overlap": 84, "skills_to_close": [ "Reading Comprehension", "Social Perceptiveness", "Persuasion", "Service Orientation" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }