Are public university classes really taught by assistants, not profs?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>I go to a big public non-selective university in California (a CSU) and I have never had a class taught by a TA. However, the university does employ a number of part time “instructors” who are not tenured professors, but are almost all PhD’s already. It’s like a professorial temp – even though some of them have been teaching part time for more than 5 years. All of my instructor-level folks have been pretty much amazing and professor-level in their teaching.</p>

<p>My understanding is that we don’t have TA’s because the CSU mandate is to NOT offer PhD’s. There are a few master’s candidates in my department (Humanities) but they do not teach, as far as I’m aware.</p>

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<p>Do TAs “teach” classes at public universities? Yes. Is it more common for TAs to teach classes at public universities than at private research universities? Perhaps, but not by a signficant margin. For some strange reason, people love to exaggerate the extend to which public universities have:</p>

<p>1) Financial troubles
2) Huge classes
3) Administrative redtape that delay graduation
4) TAs teach too many classes</p>

<p>Those are definitely present at public universities, but they are just as common at private universities. The way classes are taught and class size varries very little among universities within the same peer group. Of course, comparing a tiny private LAC to a huge, underfunded public university is pointless. But in most casses, the differences are negligible.</p>

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<p>Another exaggeration:</p>

<p>5) Impersonal</p>

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<p>True. I don’t see how a university with 7,000-15,000 undergrads AND 6,000-15,000 graduate students is going to be much more “personal” than a university with 15,000-30,000 undergrads and 6,000-15,000 graduate students.</p>

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<p>I’ve taken classes at Dartmouth College this year.
In my intro class for Native American studies, it was taught by a professor every single day.
But in my math classes, most of them have been taught by a TA.
I think it’ll depend on the college/department/prof.
It’s a good thing to ask admissions!</p>

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<p>

That’s playing fast and loose with the numbers. When comparing enrollments, one should count only areas in which undergraduates and graduate students overlap. To use one of your alma maters as an extreme example, what sense does it make to include medical students in Cornell’s total? It’s in NYC, nowhere near the main campus and its undergraduates. This is not unusual; vet schools are quite often located elsewhere, for example, as are things like JHU’s IR school and NYU’s IFA. Even when things are located on one contiguous campus, law and other professional schools are often shoved to one corner of campus with their own buildings, libraries, career centers, etc. </p>

<p>To use examples with which I am familiar:</p>

<p>Duke has 6500 undergraduates and 7000 graduate students, thus falling into your first category. Only 2800 of those graduate students are in arts & sciences or engineering, however, and thus competing with undergraduates for attention. That’s a total of 9300 students overlapping.</p>

<p>UNC has 18,500 undergraduates and 11,000 graduate students, thus falling into your second category. Counting all of the categories in which there is overlap between the two (arts & sciences, business, education, library science, dentistry, journalism, nursing, public health), there is a total of 18,500 undergraduates and 7000 graduate students – for a whopping total of 25,000 students. That is more than double that of Duke’s overlapping population (and trust me, you can very much detect that difference).</p>

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<p>I dont think everywhere same situation will be, its responsibility of college management too…</p>

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<p>This is not unique to large public universities. Top private universities also liberally employ TA’s to teach large intro. courses (Stanford et al come to mind). The only way to avoid this altogether is to attend a strictly undergraduate institution (e.g. LAC), where the faculty focus is on the college student (rather than post-docs).</p>

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<p>MIT OpenCourseWare has a course that’s taught by an undergraduate - the video lectures show that he’s teaching a course. I don’t necessarily think that there’s a problem with undergrads or grad students teaching a course, as long as they know their stuff, can communicate it and manage the class.</p>

<p>There’s a pretty cool chemistry course online at Yale. If you watch the videos, you’ll see the the professor covers a lot of the lore of chemistry during class. You might ask when he covers the course material. I don’t know if he does cover much of that in class - perhaps the students are expected to get that out of the textbook and the assignments. At some level, certainly in grad school, students are expected to do a lot of the learning on their own.</p>

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<p>As a counterexample, there’s only one course at Carnegie Mellon that’s allowed to be taught by graduate students (and post-docs) and that’s the freshman writing class (that way, they can keep each class to under 25 students). Everything else is taught by a professor.</p>

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<p>This is not a new discussion, it went on in my time in college more years ago then I care to count. From what I hear from kids recently graduated we have hired and from kids in college, as others have pointed out, there is no rule on this. There has been a lot of angst about this over the years, that some professors, especially the ‘stars’, often were reluctant to teach lower level or sometimes undergrad courses at all (on the other hand, Richard Feynman always claimed the intro courses in physics kept him young…then again, this was Cal Tech, where freshman physics probably teaches quantum electrodynamics <em>lol</em>). </p>

<p>It also depends on the courses, in my experience and what go on recently, TA’s tend to teach, where used, in the following kinds of classes (and keep in mind this is my experience, which is very limited)</p>

<p>-Things like freshman expository writing courses
-TA’s generally control lab courses and recitations for classes in physics and chem, which makes sense
-Often, in the basic survey courses in the ‘core’ or ‘liberal education’ requirements and such, you will see grad TA’s sometimes teaching (since most of these are intro courses to the major track IME).</p>

<p>-First level math courses, like Calc, often had grad students teaching it</p>

<p>-Intro CS courses. </p>

<p>On the other hand, with science classes like physics or chemistry or engineering courses and such, I never had a TA or heard of one teaching it from my circle of recent college students/grads. Likewise, in core tracks for majors, in almost everything, other then the intro courses it doesn’t seem like TA’s teach much. </p>

<p>Part of the background of this has been something that has been debated for years at the college level, about what makes a great professor. Generally, tenured professors get tenure for their research and writing (the old publish or perish), which doesn’t necessarily make for a great teacher but does bring prestige to their school…and especially since those kinds of professors spend a lot of time on research and such and some feel teaching distracts from the primary work of that research. The dark side of that is assistant and associate profs working towards tenure, who are great teachers and really care about that, often end up getting denied tenure because they don’t have the huge paper trail because they spend much of their effort on teaching. Where TA’s, least from what I can tell, were often used were the classes where the tenure track profs felt it was a waste of time…</p>

<p>These days it also has changed, a lot of colleges are using adjunct professors, who basically are outside contractors who are hired to teach classes for X dollars that semester, and often teach at more then one school and so forth, it is a lot cheaper for the schools to do this, and I wonder if they have replaced TA’s in some of the classrooms (I have no way of knowing). This has changed the dynamic from what I understand, though I suspect tenure track is not totally a dinosaur, since they need their ‘stars’ to attract kids to want to go nuts applying to get into the school:).</p>

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<p>On the money. The best LACs: no grad students, no night students (so no adjunct profs), no summer school. All the focus is on undergrad students and professors.</p>

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<p>You try living on 30,000.!!! I work at a public university and get paid that much (actually less) and it’s not enough to pay the bills let alone put two boys through college even though my husband has a 100.000. dollar job!</p>

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<p>Yes, I agree. But is that healthy? I mean when you go out into the big bad mean world will anyone pay that much attention to you? What you learn in a big public university is all about getting into the real world. Do you really want to be made hostage by the “professor’s” view from when s/he was hired and kept pristine clean for 20 years in the middle of nowhere? You’ve seen those movies and they are true! Those small private colleges are all about the egos and little lives of the profs living in their tiny universes! Let your child loose and experience what is happening now! I am all about the public university. And guess what? I teach at one!</p>

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<p>Yes, I agree. But is that healthy? I mean when you go out into the big bad mean world will anyone pay that much attention to you? What you learn in a big public university is all about getting into the real world. Do you really want to be made hostage by the “professor’s” view from when s/he was hired and kept pristine clean for 20 years in the middle of nowhere? You’ve seen those movies and they are true! Those small private colleges are all about the egos and little lives of the profs living in their tiny universes! Let your child loose and experience what is happening now! I am all about the public university. And guess what? I teach at one!</p>

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<p>The median household income was $50,233 in 2006 according to the Census
Bureau. It might even be less than that today. Our household salary
income is less than yours but we’re managing two in college without
any borrowing. The last time we had a loan was in the 1990s.</p>

<p>I think that there are many that learn better in a more roped-off
setting. I also think that there’s are positive aspects to having to
deal in the rough and tumble world of public higher education.</p>

<p>One of my nieces goes to Amherst. One of the factors in picking a
school was small classes. She needs small classes to reduce the
chances of picking up infections as she as a compromised immune
system.</p>

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<p>I go to a rather large public university, and I’ve only had one TA taught class. I’ve also had classes as small as six.</p>

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<p>About 25 years ago, I took a Intro to Psychology class from a PhD student in Psychology. I think her title was TA, meaning teaching assistant. I also took music classes (smaller ones for non-majors) from PhD Music students. In all these cases, I felt I had great instructors and didn’t feel cheated one bit.</p>

<p>All my discussions and lab classes were taught by TAs and they were hit and miss, like professors really. They all got the job done and if you had questions, you could always go to the professor’s office hours. I did my undergraduate work at Cal -Berkeley.</p>

<p>Now, my husband is a graduate student in math (went back to school to become a prof) and he started with the Cal State (as opposed to University of CA) system working on his master’s degree as his previous bachelor’s and master’s were in engineering. He is currently teaching 2 sections of a basic algebra class for non-technical majors. He just started this semester. He holds office hours and has an assigned desk. He is called a TA, but TA means teaching associate, and if he was teaching one more section/class, he would be considered a full time employee and qualify for benefits, so it seems to be more than what I used to call a TA-teaching assistant position.</p>

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<p>I am a psychology major, have attended three different public universities, and have never had an actual class taught by a TA. One of the schools I attended had a completely separate honors college, meaning all of the courses were honors courses, and all my professors just taught at this honors college, which was separate (and rather far) from the main university campus. In my two years there, I never visited the main university, and for the honors college, TAs did not exist.</p>

<p>Of the other two schools, one was a relatively small (and rather prestigious), and I only remember TAs assisting in large lecture courses (with grading, and emailing the class with updates), but not actually teaching.</p>

<p>The last (and my current) school is a very large public, and yet I have only had a few classes that even employed TAs, but also I have only taken lower division course at this school, and it was during the summer. That being said, I developed very close relationships with two of these TAs (in different courses), both times when I didn’t feel like my personality meshed as well with the Prof’s. I always like to try to get to know my professors, and yes, that is even possible when you attend the largest university in your state and your course has 200 students.</p>

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<p>Approx. 40% of classes at my state’s flagship state U are taught by non-tenure track faculty–grad students, “instructors,” and adjuncts. People there have told me that many of the instructors and adjuncts are ABD or recent PhDs.</p>