{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/sociology-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": "Sociology Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1067", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 11850, "median_annual_wage": 84290 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 47, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 9, "embodiment": 9, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 14, "judgment_accountability": 12 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Roughly half the week — building syllabi, slide decks, discussion prompts, multiple-choice item banks, marking 120 intro-level short answers against a rubric — is text-in/text-out work a model does credibly now, which is what pins this at 9 rather than mid-teens; the part that holds is running a live seminar where a student says something racist or wounded and you have twenty seconds to decide how to use it, plus supervising honors theses and IRB-approved data collection.", "embodiment": "The physical component is being bodily present in a room at a fixed hour — proctoring, office hours, the field-methods course that sends students out to observe a courthouse or a bus depot — but none of it involves uncontrolled environments or manual skill.", "liability_shield": "No state licence, no board, no certification exam gates who teaches Intro to Sociology; the PhD is a hiring convention, and for the adjunct teaching three sections on a semester contract even that is negotiable, so nothing legally requires a specific credentialed human to sign off on the course.", "trust_premium": "Students choose sections by instructor and disclose things in your office — family incarceration, immigration status, sexual assault, the reason they missed three weeks — that they will not type into a chatbot, and the letters of recommendation and grad-school advising that follow are worth nothing unless a named person who knows them writes them.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide when a discussion of policing or gender has crossed from productive discomfort into harm, whether a plagiarism case goes to the academic integrity office, how to grade an argument you find politically wrong but methodologically sound, and whether an undergraduate research design touching vulnerable populations is defensible to the IRB — real calls with consequences, but bounded by department curricula, appeals processes, and Title IX reporting rules that take the hardest decisions out of your hands." }, "rationale": "The document-production half of this job — syllabi, lecture slides, reading summaries, exam banks, rubric-based grading of essays, literature reviews — is already within reach of current models, and enrollment in sociology majors is shrinking, which matters more than automation for headcount. What persists is live seminar facilitation on contested topics (race, class, deviance) where students specifically want a human in the room, mentoring and thesis supervision, and original empirical research with IRB accountability. The modal worker here is increasingly a contingent/adjunct instructor with no licensure shield and weak institutional protection, which is the real vulnerability.", "outlook": "Headcount contracts over the next decade driven by falling sociology enrollment and adjunct substitution more than by AI, with surviving positions concentrated in methods instruction, research supervision, and in-person seminar teaching.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Accreditor or state-system rules requiring that courses advertised as in-person seminars be led by a human instructor of record, plus institutional 'AI disclosure' policies (already appearing in SUNY/CSU academic senate resolutions and AAUP guidance) that force programs to state whether instruction is AI-assisted — making human-taught small seminars a marketed, tuition-justifying product", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "IRB and research-integrity regimes tightening so that a named faculty PI must personally attest to human-subjects protocol compliance and to the provenance of qualitative data — plus journals (Sage, ASA journals) requiring a named human to certify no fabricated interview/ethnographic data, which is squarely sociological work", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift: if slide decks, exam banks and first-pass essay grading are conceded to AI, the residual role is live facilitation of contested-topic discussion, thesis supervision, and fieldwork design — the genuine judgment tier this occupation has. Watch for departments formally reassigning grading load to AI while protecting seminar caps", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Title VI/Title IX and state 'divisive concepts' enforcement making the instructor of record personally answerable for classroom content decisions, with faculty handbooks naming them as the responsible party for AI-generated course materials; also union contracts (CFA, Rutgers AAUP-AFT) with clauses barring AI as instructor of record", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, headcount is governed by sociology major enrollment and the tenure-track-to-adjunct ratio, not by task automation; a higher score would describe the protected instructor of record, not the modal adjunct." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 13630, "wage": 73080 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 13870, "wage": 74140 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 13850, "wage": 75290 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 13420, "wage": 75610 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 12550, "wage": 77980 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 12030, "wage": 78970 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 12870, "wage": 82670 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 12380, "wage": 82540 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 11850, "wage": 84290 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -13.1, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 59, "median_wage": 128500, "overlap": 80, "skills_to_close": [ "Judgment and Decision Making" ] }, { "slug": "art-drama-and-music-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 78620, "overlap": 79, "skills_to_close": [] }, { "slug": "clinical-and-counseling-psychologists", "title": "Clinical and Counseling Psychologists", "verdict": "SAFE", "risk_resistance": 71, "median_wage": 100580, "overlap": 72, "skills_to_close": [ "Social Perceptiveness", "Persuasion", "Reading Comprehension", "Service Orientation" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }