Reply to If you think it matters that your kid's classes be taught by a professor: Why?

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[quote=Anonymous]I work in the administration of a large public university and am a graduate of another large public university. I think most of the points I make below have already been made by others, but I'll repeat them anyway.

Here's the reason why professors are preferred: They tend to have been vetted and approved for their competent teaching abilities. At my current university, an assistant professor seeking tenure is judged by research output and teaching quality, which are weighed equally. Most of our tenured professors needed to get good to great teaching marks to get tenure. There are, of course, exceptions. For instance, some profs may reduce their teaching effort after getting tenure, although it's more likely that they'd reduce their research/publication output. And there are some people who are such productive luminaries in their particular field that that they may get tenure despite their poor teaching. But the general rule at most universities is that most professors had to be good teachers to get tenure. (This is especially true at more teaching-focused colleges and LACs.) Also, as noted above, more often than not, people get better at teaching the longer they do it.

TAs, on the other hand, have not been vetted for their teaching. They may be graduate students who are subsidizing the cost of their education by doing paid work, whether or not they like their job or are interested in teaching. Others may be newly minted PhDs who essentially have four year to prove to the university that they should get tenure. Some do not get tenure on the basis of their sub-par teaching, even if their research output is otherwise strong enough. And sometimes there's just a need for a "warm body" to teach a particular class. That happens more often than one might expect.

In my personal experience, most of my TAs were fine to very good. I can only remember one graduate TA who mailed it in. But I think my actual professors, on the whole, offered better teaching quality and had more time for me. On the other hand, I think it's good for undergraduates to have some exposure to graduate students. I learned a lot from my own exposure to grad students--i.e., as much as I enjoyed the subject I studied, I didn't want to pursue a career in academia, which seemed like an unstable grind. [/quote]

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