Correction— the author of the op-ed, Nicholas Weaver, is a former lecturer in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA)

Correction— the author of the op-ed, Nicholas Weaver, is a former lecturer in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA) in the department, the problem isn’t paying TAs enough. The pay is actually quite high for a student job (especially when you factor in the fact that in-state tuition is paid for). But the course budgets simply aren’t high enough to hire the sheer quantity of TAs that would be required to handle all of the students who want to take the classes. I was involved in hiring some semesters, and there were always more people we wanted to hire than the budget would allow. I believe the situation has only gotten worse since I left.