Cap TA-Student Ratios

To Fight Restructuring, Academic Workers Need a Cap on TA-Student Ratios

With a potential graduate worker strike on the horizon, one thing is clear: The University of California is increasingly treating grad workers as a disposable labor force. Across the system, the administration is systematically putting the squeeze on us: attempting to reduce guaranteed funding from five years to four, cutting programs, enrolling fewer grads, and even experimenting with replacing our instructional labor with AI. This isn’t merely bureaucratic negligence; it’s a deliberate strategy to squeeze more labor out of fewer grad workers, and ultimately to shrink – or even eliminate – the graduate student workforce altogether.

Nowhere is this strategy more immediate – or more dangerous in the long run – than in the issue of class sizes and student-to-TA ratios. By refusing to set limits on section sizes, total enrollment, and the number of students assigned to each TA, the university administration is signaling both that our work conditions are irrelevant and that we – the people whose work university lecture courses depend on – are ultimately expendable. It is up to us, in this contract campaign, to force the university to respect our work through concrete, enforceable caps. Without them, work speed-ups will continue unchecked, educational quality will suffer, and graduate workers will only be further treated as replaceable cogs in a process of austerity-driven restructuring.

What is restructuring?

Restructuring refers to qualitative changes that UC administration is already moving toward. We use the language of restructuring to separate qualitative change from the quantitative degradations we are already talking about: budget cuts, fellowship reductions, staff reductions, shrinking graduate cohorts, increased class sizes, etc. All of these quantitative changes are indeed taking place. It is true that UCSC is getting worse according to these quantitative metrics. But this hides the fact that the administration has already made clear it wants to make UCSC worse in new ways that cannot be understood in numerical terms alone. The administration is actively working toward a future in which graduate student labor is no longer recognized as necessary for the delivery of its educational mission. This is a future with significantly fewer TAs, smaller graduate programs, and significantly degraded undergraduate academic quality. Below, we explain the nature of this restructuring. We also explain why fighting for a TA-student ratio cap is how graduate student employees can stop this restructuring. 

What about graduate programs do they want to restructure?

The example of UCSC illustrates the importance of the TA-Student ratio to the UC model, and the self-conscious use of this ratio as a measure of academic quality. The UC laid out its intensions for restructuring in a 2025 document called “The Future of Doctoral Programs at the UC.” If pressed on these plans, UC administration would surely point to the fact that this document is closer to a “thought experiment” than a blueprint. This would be fair enough. The document is full of specific “experimental,” non-essential, and frankly unserious ideas that will never be implemented. However, there is one essential idea from which all the others emerge: they want to “fully decouple academic effort from employment.” In this future, it would no longer be a given that graduate students are also graduate employees. It would mean the end of the existing model for funding our studies. The study doesn’t specify what an alternative model would be, though it offers various galaxy-brained possibilities (such as making us pay back a portion of our salaries once our careers are established). However, this is not surprising, given that the future of doctoral programs it envisions is one with fewer graduate students, smaller graduate programs, fewer graduate programs, and a shorter UK-style timeline for completion. This is what the study’s vision of the future looks like from the graduate student perspective.

Taking a wider view, these changes portend a complete overhaul of how the UC delivers on its educational mission. From the 1960s onward, the UC’s prestigious reputation and once top-level state funding (relative to CSUs and CCs) was backed by the unique role of graduate student TAs on campus. Undergraduates had the opportunity to learn from top-level faculty who would serve a dual role as teacher and researcher. And the UC enabled the state of California to offer this education en masse. This had never been done before. Previously, elite liberal arts education was the domain of small, private liberal arts colleges and universities. The UC rightly sees itself as the pathbreaker of the American public research university. Unfortunately, for this same reason, the authors of the document see an imperative to innovate a new model that similar institutions will adopt. The study authors are not shy about advocating a qualitative shift away from the model that has existed today, speaking favorably of adapting: “doctoral education for new contexts that differ radically from what existed when the UC was created.” What is the nature of the academic model the UC wants to leave behind?   

TAs were (and are) the lynchpin of this model. For one, TA instructional and grading support enables faculty to serve in their dual capacity as teacher-researchers. More important, however, are the discussion sections that TAs lead. Relatively small section sizes give undergraduates the best of both worlds: in lectures, they learn from faculty at the cutting edge of their disciplines; in sections, they benefit from face-to-face engagement with excellent junior scholars who work closely with the same faculty. What this reveals is that the UC academic model is built on face-to-face engagement: that is, instructional quality.

A restructured UC with fewer graduate students (and very few TAs) is a UC without discussion sections. We are already creeping toward this future with increased section sizes and the phasing out of sections in some cases. We want to emphasize that we can already see quantitative signs of this qualitative restructuring. Restructuring will happen, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, “In two ways… gradually, and then suddenly.”

UCSC was founded according to an experimental model that didn’t include graduate students. It quickly began creeping toward the mainstream UC model as it admitted bigger and bigger undergraduate classes. Though UCSC added graduate programs and committed itself to the mainstream UC model, it has always been at the bottom of the UC from the perspective of its graduate-undergraduate ratio. In 2002, the UCSC Academic Senate passed a resolution recognizing this metric as a measure of poor academic quality and demanding that “UCSC commit itself to growth in graduate and professional programs, both existing and new, with the goal of attaining a student population containing at least 15% graduate students.”

Why do we need to talk about restructuring in terms of instructional quality?

The UC has long claimed that graduate student workers are “too expensive.” They said it before our last contract, they said it after we won that contract, and they are saying it again even more forcefully now. Inevitably, they will say so again during a 2026 graduate worker strike.

Identifying their intention to restructure clarifies that the UC will say we are too expensive no matter what. In the future they want, graduate students are not seen as essential to delivering the UC’s educational mission. We do not have to accept this framing—nor do undergraduates or faculty.

One thing that thinking about the current (though degraded) UC model helps to clarify is this: high academic quality is backed by the transformative potential of face-to-face engagement between students and instructors. The framing of restructuring clarifies why section size caps must be built into our contract. Section caps force the UC to acknowledge that education depends on face-to-face engagement—something that cannot be replaced by AI TA chatbots. Graduate student labor is a necessary cost of quality education. We must prevent them from normalizing education without (or with significantly less) instructional engagement–the kind of engagement that students are currently afforded by TAs and GSIs in discussion sections and small class sizes.

What is the UAW 4811 bargaining team currently asking for?

At present, the UAW 4811 bargaining team is demanding an official class size policy in each unit that employs TAs for the first time, one that includes a maximum number of students in each section and a maximum ratio of students to TAs in a given course. The proposed policy would require that the number of students tasked to each TA be “commensurate with the workload expectations of a 50% appointment.”