Postsecondary Teacher
| Median wage (USD) | 85330 |
|---|---|
| Projected employment growth (%) | 7 |
| AI exposure (%) | 47 |
| Maximum exposure (%) | 68 |
| Source | eloundou |
| What AI changes in this occupation | Preparing course materials — syllabi, assignments, handouts —, writing and grading examinations, keeping grade records and scanning the literature are moving to tools that draft, mark and summarize: the documentation side of teaching is the share being delegated Student work now arrives drafted by AI, which shifts assessment towards checking the reasoning and the sources; the lecture is split between in-person, online and pre-recorded content, and the number of positions depends on public budgets as much as on student numbers Conducting and publishing research, supervising theses and dissertations, judging the value of a piece of work, advising a student on their path and arbitrating a curriculum in committee remain human — that is where the university stakes its reputation |
| Key skills | University teaching and course design · research and scientific publication · thesis and dissertation supervision · assessment and feedback · grant writing · academic committees and governance · research integrity and ethics · AI tools for course preparation and text revision |
| Courses to get ahead | University Teaching · Coursera (The University of Hong Kong) · About 17 hours in total · 92 · The course that matches the core gesture of the job: designing a course, setting learning objectives and assessing what students have actually understood. It comes from the University of Hong Kong, where higher education is assessed on these criteria — the part of the job AI assists without owning. Writing in the Sciences · Coursera (Stanford Online) · About 25 hours in total · 90 · Publication is the task this job does not delegate: it is what decides an academic career. Stanford's course works through the scientific paper from the inside — structure, clarity, revision — precisely what a language model suggests without being able to own. AI For Everyone · Coursera (DeepLearning.AI) · About 7 hours in total · 86 · For deciding what to delegate and what to keep: the course explains what generative AI can do, where it fails and how to frame a project that uses it. It is the skill most often missing in a department when students arrive with generated work. Understanding Research Methods · Coursera (University of London) · About 6 hours in total · 82 Data Science Ethics · Coursera (University of Michigan) · About 15 hours in total · 79 Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT · Coursera (Vanderbilt University) · About 19 hours in total · 76 |
| Occupations to pivot toward | High School Teacher · 64580 · -2 · 34 Instructional Coordinator · 77440 · 1 · 53 Training and Development Manager · 133000 · 6 · 48 |
| Skills to acquire for the pivot | Eloundou measures the university professor's exposure at 47% (human β) and up to 68% (human ζ): preparing course materials, writing and grading examinations, marking, keeping records and scanning the literature are largely delegable to AI, but conducting and publishing research, supervising theses and dissertations, delivering the course and advising students remain human. A method note is essential here: the O*NET-SOC taxonomy has no generic code for "university professor". It splits the job into thirty-five discipline codes (25-1011 to 25-1194), and BLS publishes salary and projections only for the group "Postsecondary Teachers" (SOC 25-1000) — the page its A-Z index points every "X Professor" title to. The card is therefore anchored on 25-1064.00 "Geography Teachers, Postsecondary": its human values (β 47, ζ 68) are those of the average of the group's thirty-five codes (β 47, ζ 69), and the spread between disciplines runs from β 37 (nursing, computer science, physics) to β 65 (family and consumer sciences) — no discipline could have been neutral, and this one favours none. The GPT-4 self-rated series (β 48, ζ 77) is kept in expositionGpt4 and is not displayed, in line with the decision of 21 August 2026. Within the repository, 47 puts the professor just below the lawyer (48), level with the software architect and the HR manager (45), well above the high school teacher (34) and the physician (38) — university teaching is judged more exposed than school teaching because a larger share of the work is text: curricula, papers, assessments, grant applications — and far below the copywriter (81) and the translator (84), whose material is almost entirely language. BLS projects 7% growth in postsecondary teacher employment from 2025 to 2035, a pace "much faster than the average" for all occupations (+3%), with about 103,300 openings a year over the decade. It is one of the few teaching occupations that is growing: in the same projection round, high school teachers decline 2%. The driver cited is rising enrolment in higher education, but BLS itself warns that employment growth in public colleges and universities will depend on state and local government budgets: the number of positions is settled in a public budget as much as by teaching need. The nuance matters when reading the figure — the ζ of 68% says nearly seven tenths of the job are at least partly transformable, but hiring follows the funding envelopes. O*NET also recalls how much the group gathers: the discipline code used for this card (25-1064, geography teachers) counts only 4,000 employees in 2024 and 300 projected openings over 2024-2034, while the BLS page covers every discipline together. The occupation's median salary is $85,330 a year, the May 2025 figure from the BLS OEWS survey published on the Occupational Outlook Handbook page "Postsecondary Teachers": it is the only figure BLS publishes for this occupation, and it covers all disciplines together — the same $85,330 appears in the "similar occupations" tables of other OOH pages. That figure averages very different situations: the OES median for the discipline code used here (25-1064) is $97,590, and disciplines run from computer science and nursing, which are in high demand, to the humanities and the arts, where part-time work and lecturer positions pull the median down. O*NET places the occupation in "Job Zone Five: Extensive Preparation Needed" and notes that most of these positions require graduate study — a master's degree, sometimes a doctorate. For context: all occupations stand at $50,980, high school teachers at $64,580, instructional coordinators at $77,440 and training and development managers at $133,000. The ceiling of this occupation comes not from teaching but from research, consulting and leadership positions. Every value on this card comes from a named source; none is left as an estimate. |
| GPT-4 exposure — beta / zeta (%) | 48 · 77 |