This month, would-be doctoral candidates are responding to admissions offers from the UW.

However, some candidates in the College of Arts & Sciences may not be accepting offers of admission because teaching assistant (TA) positions, the means of support and income for many graduate students, will be cut by 18-20 percent next year.

“We prefer to have an entering class of 50 students each year,” said Paul Hopkins, chair of the Department of Chemistry.

This year, only 33 graduate students will enter in the fall to study toward their doctorate with Hopkins.

“A TA-ship is of immeasurable benefit,” said third-year doctoral student Lisa Schebetta. “Not only [does it] pay the bills, but … it permits you to stay connected to the university, your research and ultimately, to the timely completion of your dissertation.”

Doctoral candidates aren’t the only ones relying on TA positions, however. An 18-20 percent reduction in TAs will also have a significant impact on undergraduate students navigating through lower-division coursework.

“Each class will be of lower quality,” Hopkins said. “There will be more students assigned to each TA, less laboratory work and fewer graded papers. You can’t just ask a TA to grade 50 percent more papers.”

Hopkins said he has two options to mitigate the TA shortage. He can either assign more students to each TA, or he can put an enrollment cap on each course, keeping the quality of education relatively the same.

Hopkins doesn’t like the second idea.

“The people who are taking it the hardest financially are the people who are paying more tuition,” Hopkins said. “The last thing we want to tell [students] is ‘you can’t get your class.’”

The college’s decision to cut TAs follows a request from the provost’s office to model three scenarios that reflect 8, 10 and 12 percent budget cuts in the 2009-2011 biennium.

At 8 percent cuts, the College of Arts & Sciences would be losing $9.8 million.

“You just can’t take out almost $10 million from a college like ours and not have an impact on undergraduate education — no matter how hard we try to put students first,” said Ana Mari Cauce, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.

In the English department, where writing skills are honed through composition coursework, students will have less exposure to writing courses, revision work and feedback.

“TAs do an awful lot of the work in facilitating active learning for undergraduates,” said Gary Handwerk, chair of the English department. “I think there’s going to be a noticeable difference in the amount of learning that undergraduates will be able to do.”

An 18-20 percent reduction in TAs in the English department means 35 sections of first-year writing composition courses will be cut, displacing more than 700 students. For 200-level classes, 32 TA positions will be cut with a loss of 1,300 student slots.

Handwerk said the department is working on ways to soften the blow.

“We’ve changed the composition rules needed to graduate, so students can’t count more than one composition course toward their degree,” Handwerk said.

He hopes this change will deter students from signing up for classes if it won’t help them meet graduation requirements.

“About 500 seats we’ll be cutting won’t affect students graduating,” he said.

Even with administrators working to minimize negative effects, Schebetta feels that a reduction in TAs will ultimately damage the campus community.

“The process of getting a Ph.D. can be quite lonely,” Schebetta said. “A Ph.D. student’s research benefits from time in the classroom. There is, thus, a mutual benefit between the TA and undergraduate that enriches the quality of education.”

Reach reporter Eric Staples at news@dailyuw.com.