Protect the Quality of Education at UCSC! Reduce Class Size!

Petition: Protect the Quality of Education at UC Santa Cruz! Reduce Class Size!

The quality of education for undergraduates is being sacrificed in order to manage the fiscal crisis. As a result of ballooning class, section, and lab sizes, undergraduate students are receiving an inferior education. The curriculum for many classes is being altered to include more quizzes and scantron tests to accommodate larger class sizes. As Teaching Assistants, Graduate Student Instructors, Lecturers, and Faculty are being overworked because of ballooning class size, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide the kind of individualized attention students need. As class sizes increase, moreover, Teaching Assistantships are being cut and course offerings reduced. The loss of TAships means that graduate students must go deeper into debt to stay in school or drop out of school entirely. Additionally, tuition increases have restricted access to higher education for underrepresented communities, as well as working-class and middle-class communities. We must protect the accessibility and quality of a UC education!

Key Problems

Excessively Large Class Sizes: At UC Santa Cruz, Teaching Assistants in more than 10 departments across the campus report having been assigned more than 60 students, which is linked with overwork and degraded learning environments.
Job Insecurity: Grad students at UCSC face decreasing funding guarantees. Many graduate students are forced to deal with last-minute notification of TA appointments, resulting in job insecurity and financial anxiety, while other graduate students who aren’t able to find work as TAs go into debt to stay enrolled in graduate school, go on leaves of absence, or must drop out of graduate school.
Demands: We, the undersigned, find these conditions unacceptable and demand:

1. Place a mandatory cap on the student-TA ratio set to 50:1 for classes that require discussion and/or paper writing. For sections that do not require discussion or writing, a mandatory cap based on an analysis of the hours of current or recent TAs who have assisted such courses.

2. Abolish the 18-quarter rule limiting the maximum number of TAships for graduate students to 18.

3. Guarantee funding, including TAships and GSRships for every quarter enrolled, and provide stronger appointment security by requiring year-long minimum appointment guarantees, and aiming at multi-year appointment guarantees.

4. Post all TAship openings promptly and campus-wide and guarantee that graduate students are offered TAships and given a chance to show their qualifications before the jobs are downgraded to Readerships or Course Assistantships, underpaid and de-benefitted, and offered to other folks.

5. Base future budgeting and classroom policy changes on the needs and recommendations of instructors and TAs, not the other way around.