<p>I think your concerns are very well warranted. I am a TA for the computer science department and have been for the last five semesters. I have noticed, over this time period, a significant decrease in both professor teaching and TAs.</p>
<p>First of all, there is a hiring freeze. This means that if a professor quits or retires (which has happened in many departments), they’re not allowed to hire someone new. So all of the professors get an increased course load (without getting raises). For the ones that don’t even want to be teaching to begin with (remember, this is a research university) this means they put even less into each class. Then, for the professors who do care about teaching, they have less time to spend on each class so either they’re exhausted or there’s a hit to the quality as well.</p>
<p>So then you would think they could hire TAs to help them with this increased work load? Well that is obviously not true either. They are not admitting as many graduate students so that part of the labor force is out, since they have no money to fund them, and then they have no money to hire undergrads so either tenured professors have to spend money out of pocket to get help or else they just don’t hire enough. By enough I mean standards before they had more classes to teach, let alone the increase they are now dealing with. There’s just no money and it really negatively affects the students. I say this from first hand experience, there are not enough hours of help provided to the students.</p>
<p>There are also additional things happening, such as far away dorms being given to first years (and upperclassmen kicked out) – this is in part because of the dorm construction, but I think it’s also a tool by housing, since before this many rooms sat empty but now every room is full so they are making more money this way. Some majors that weren’t capped are now being capped, or for instance the Spanish department eliminated its minor because there weren’t enough professors to teach major classes with having to teach minor classes. The Engineering school has been capped since I have been here but it’s more of an issue to students now I think.</p>
<p>Some things that have remained great (or gotten better) would be dining (better food, no cut to hours), housing maintenance, and parking (no price increase, though they have started resorting to obnoxious ticketing to make money and a lot of parking lots are closed for construction that had free parking on the weekends previously).</p>
<p>Even with these cuts, public school education (and really any college education) is what you make of it. UVA isn’t in jeopardy or anything, but the quality is definitely not the same as the first year I entered here (but it’s still a great school).</p>