Universities: The Ubiquitous TA

U.S. higher education is caught with a supply of professors trimmed by the low training rate of the times before and just after World War II and a demand of students swelled by the baby boom of the late '40s. On top of that, the growth of postgraduate education has forced top professors to concentrate much of their teaching effort on older students. The sum of such pressures is that many universities are turning over a large share of freshman and sophomore teaching to graduate students. These teaching fellows or teaching assistants—often...