One thing that I am wondering about: Should a TA necessarily get paid well enough to cover their full cost of education?
I have a daughter still in university as an undergraduate student, but who was asked to work as a TA for a freshman class. She is not getting enough to cover her full cost of education, nor are they covering her tuition (although different merit based aid comes close). She is however getting what amounts to a pretty good “per hour” income, and being a TA does not interfere with her education and her research project. It definitely beats working in the cafeteria for at least three reasons (it pays better, it is more interesting, and it adds more to a student’s resume when applying for jobs or graduate schools in the future).
When I went off to university and when my kids went off to university, we saw what sort of offer the schools gave us. We figured out what it would cost, and made sure that we had the money to cover whatever was not covered by various forms of financial aid. This also applies to my masters and my wife’s masters. We did not expect the university to make it free for us. I turned down one school (which was ironically UC Santa Cruz) specifically because it was not affordable.
I think that you see what offer you get from schools, you figure out if you can afford it and if you want to do it, and then you either accept the deal or you don’t. If you accept a deal, then you live with it if you possibly can. If you cannot afford whatever deal is offered, then you go somewhere else.