Are schools with teacher assistants bad?

I agree. It can be a frustrating task to uncover these numbers. Sometimes a school’s website gives the figure, often not. The Common Data Set info on a given school does not clearly and explicitly give this info, at least not as I have been able to interpret it.

Public universities with fewer graduate students may not use many TAs because of lack of supply.

Of course, at these schools, and LACs, a significant number of the faculty may be adjuncts.

There are no quick stats that people can cite – and, even if there were, the stats could vary wildly by department (e.g. English and foreign languages commonly use TA as lead instructors in frosh-level courses, but that is much less common in other subjects, where TAs are usually secondary instructors in discussion or lab sections), so that overall school stats can mislead (just like proxy measures of class size). Someone looking for the answer to this question, for a specific school and potential major subject, needs to dig around the school’s class schedule to figure out the class formats, and match up instructor names to rosters of faculty and graduate students in that department.

In case it has not been clear: Ph.D. candidates make up most of the teaching assistants in research institutions; these are graduate students who are becoming experts in the field but have not yet completed their Ph.D. Typically, the professor (who has completed their Ph.D.), teaches the large lecture class several times a week, and that is supplemented by smaller discussion or lab sections led by TAs. TAs may do the grading of the students who are in their discussion section, subject to parameters set by the professor, and often lead supplemental review sessions etc. before exams. At some schools, Ph.D. candidates may be the “lead” instructor for a class, typically as they get closer to completion of their Ph.D. program (including, I believe, some of Columbia’s introductory core curriculum classes, which are highly competitive positions to get). Largely, Ph.D. programs are funded by the department, students are not paying tuition to participate in the program. For a Ph.D. student, working as a TA is part of the department’s funding, particularly to get the stipend which covers a grad student’s bare-bones living expenses.

A school with TAs is neither “good” nor “bad.” It simply means that the institution is a research institution which has Ph.D. students who are preparing to enter the academic field. There has been lots of commentary about the move to use adjuncts to cover teaching responsibilities, and that is a whole different dilemma if an institution is using adjuncts as TAs or as a big part of its teaching.

The Common Data Set does show the number, and percentage, of part-time, non-tenure track teaching faculty. But even looking at that number, one has to drill further down, because often professionals in a field may serve as part-time instructors, particularly in music and fine art programs. A related point is that the student-faculty ration can appear low when a school offers a lot of private music lessons – 100 different students having private, one on one lessons, per semester on various instruments, can throw off that ratio. Looking at the Common Data Set to see how many classes are offered at the different class sizes is more revealing than the student-faculty ration alone.

The exam grading was handled this way at the school where I TAed intro chem-

There were 3 lecture sections of ~400 students each. All would get the same midterm and final, 4 to 5 versions each. After finals all the TA’s (30 or so) would sort the tests into version, A, B, C, D, etc. If there were 4 versions, we’d split in to 4 groups. Then usually, each TA would grade one free response question. So I would grade question 1, hand it off to the student grading question 2, and so on in a round robin. Then some TA’s would be totaling, double checking totals, and entering the grades in the system. 8 hours, many pizzas and Cokes later, they were all done. It sounds chaotic and industrial, but was generally pretty fair, because with the same student grading the same problem any partial credit was awarded consistently.

With 1200 students taking intro Chem every year, we had a full time employee (PhD) who did nothing but administer the program. She assigned the lecture section instructors (PhD’s), discussion sections(TA’s), labs (TA’s) made sure all the labs were organized and supplies were ordered, etc. She arranged subs if someone was sick. She also did an orientation/training for all TA’s and evaluated us. If you got poor reviews you would not be reappointed as a TA.

Unfortunately if you go to a school where 1000+ students are taking a particular intro class, it is goign to be organized in some such fashion. No school is going to break it in to 30 student classes with a PhD at each section.

But realize by going to a school like that you do gain some advantages over a small LAC. The large and diverse student body and campus offer other opportunities. And after the first year, you are pretty much through with those sorts of classes. And you may actually like some of your TA’s and form a relationship with them, you can even end up doing research in the labs they work in, or getting some fresher advice on grad school and such than you may get from profs.

Since there is no known comprehensive source for this info, the best thing might be to ask a few students when you visit the campus, to get an idea of how heavily the school uses TAs and adjuncts.

At least at many public universities, the class search function is publicly available – you do not have to have a student ID to access it. For those schools, you can search and see, for ex, how many intro Econ classes are offered, how many discussion sections for that class and even how many seats are in the entire class as well as each section. Privates generally do not make that class search function publicly available.

Thank you everyone for your feedback! Most of the schools I’m looking at are small so I’m not too worried about TA’s, but I will check individually for intro classes in schools like George Washington and Chapel Hill. I’m glad to hear they are more helpful than I thought.

My daughter just completed her first year in CH. She only had a TA (who was almost finished with her degree) for one class- a foreign language class with 22 students. Most of her classes were relatively small. She had 3 large intro classes ( 100-200 students) that were taught by professors- the TAs taught the smaller review sessions and she had a positive experience with them. My daughter loved these larger classes - they were taught as flipped classrooms ( she had this in HS) and were very much discussion based. All of her professors knew her name and she spoke to them regularly outside of class. She had several amazing opportunities come from these relationships.