My husband has a PhD from a top 5 school and being a TA was the grunt work mostly for 1st and 2nd years. At the best schools they had a majority of TAs with native or excellent English skills but once you drop out of the top tier of schools A LOT of TAs do not and that is an issue for me with a child with hearing problems where having a teacher without clear speech is a big issue.
How much of the “hard to understand” instructors is due to accent diversity? Most colleges’ faculty and graduate students are more regionally diverse than the incoming frosh students’ home communities and high schools. So the chance of encountering an instructor (faculty or TA) with an accent that is unusual to the frosh student’s ears is probably non-trivial. Obviously, this effect is likely to be larger if the student goes out of region/state for college, compared to attending the local community college or commuter-based university.
What I was talking about was heavy foreign accents. In the two cases where I personally had to remove TAs they were both Asian grad students. They knew the material and, from what I heard, did excellent work in the lab, but they had weak English skills and extremely heavy accents.
I never heard complaints about students with Southern or British accents, only TAs for whom English was not a primary language.
Could we peel the TA discussion off to another thread? It doesn’t seem to have much to do with deal breakers at this point.
But its better than the toilet discussion. 
A semi-deal breaker for me was being essentially told by a university that their aerospace engineering program wasn’t ready to stand on its own two feet yet and I should double major in mechanical if I expected to get anywhere in aerospace.
@doschicos , touché!
A deal breaker for me would be sending my kid to an expensive OOS state rah rah school as a reach (an ACT score of 24 and the 25% is a 28). I am seeing the results of these decisions now and they are disastrous. So far I have not seen one kid turn it around, get into their intended major, take advantage of what the school offers, graduate with a plan, etc.
Seems like going to a reach school (in the normal sense, not a top-end student going to a reach-for-everyone super-selective school), regardless of whether it is out-of-state or expensive, does carry increased risk of not getting into restricted majors, etc. if the student does not make a significant improvement in academic performance compared to his/her high school record. Obviously, if the high school record was worse due to circumstances that no longer apply, the chance of improvement is better, but if there is no indication of that, then the risk is higher.
Where/how do you see the results, two girls? I m not disagreeing with your comments, just wondering where the observations are coming from. Working at one of these schools? Friends or your kids? Just wondering which it might be.
I see this with friends kids. One of my friends complains to me about it all the time. She is dealing with this, and several of her friends are dealing with this.
Don’t know if this is the case with your friend’s kids, but. Some kids with learning or attention issues choose not to pursue support services at college. And college is demanding enough for any student… Don’t. know if that’s the case with your friends’ kids, but just a thought.
No. There are no learning or attention issues.
I would not go to a reach school unless you get into your #1 major otherwise you are rolling the dice.
For once I agree with @Baylorpoly – the issue is going to a reach school to start with, and compounded by going to one that has competitive admission to majors once they are there. I wouldn’t send my kid to an in-state school with this situation.
Go for the #1 school with the major your child wants to pursue in state if possible. Thanks @intparent
I would be very skeptical to send my kid to a school with a very low endowment and visibly the campus is not well maintained
I won’t say that is always the case… but a reach school combined with competitive major access ought to be a deal breaker.
I agree with inparent, but I know many where this is not a deal breaker. I do not get it.
BTW, maybe both the TA and TP discussions can be rolled outside.