 UC Berkeley is one of the top schools in the world to study computer science, and they graduate about 1,400 computer science majors every year. In order to graduate so many students, many classes have hundreds, occasionally more than a thousand students, and are run by staff of teaching assistants led by one or two professors. However, due to recent budget cuts, soon many core classes may not have the funding they need to sustain such a large staff of teaching assistants. I'm Lucy Huang with CalTV News and recently, I sat down with two teaching assistants and one professor to talk more about how the current budget crisis is affecting students. First up, I asked Marcus Butowski, a TA for the Operating Systems class, how budget cuts have affected courses. There are fewer office hours, students have a lot of trouble being able to get in and get time, you know, sort of one-on-one attention. There were a lot of students complaining about not having that sort of one-on-one attention that they really, I'd say, I think they really do need to be able to succeed in an upper-division CS course. Next, I asked him about the long-term effects of these budget cuts. If we're, you know, sort of strange just providing the current course content, it means that we don't have time to update materials, you know, sort of modernize the code base of things that we're teaching them, and all that stuff starts building up over time. Next up, I interviewed Nicholas Nagai, the head TA for the Computer Security class. My first question was about the dangers of department-wide underfunding. CS168, which is the Intro to Internet class, if I remember correctly, was last offered in spring of 2020 because we simply haven't been able to offer it for a while. We no longer have enough skilled TAs who know the material to be able to offer that as a course anymore. I asked Nicholas what he thought we needed from the university. What we really need is just more funding from the university so that we have enough budget to hire enough TAs. We need full-time faculty so that we need more full-time faculty so that we can be offering these courses on a regular basis. Finally, I interviewed Professor Josh Hugg from the Computer Science Department. My first question was about why the EECS department was historically underfunded. So whereas we were graduating something like 350 total majors a decade ago, now we're graduating almost 1400, if you're a smaller department, then it's not as hard to cover the 50% the university doesn't fund for your TAs. But as you grow to a huge scale, suddenly there's a bigger and bigger deficit you have to make up. I asked Professor Hugg his thoughts about the growth of the Computer Science major. There's a lot of ways in which having an absolutely gigantic major is great and there are ways in which it is less great. If you're a student who wants to get research experience or mentorship or letters of recommendation, it's three times harder. Even having additional TAs will not help with that. Next, I asked Professor Hugg what he thought the university should do to address this issue. One of the ways you can try and deal with the TA crisis, the fact that the faculty is very small compared to the student body, that the rooms are not sufficient, that the staff is overworked, is you can in principle reduce the number of students. And it was a nearly unanimous vote to try and advance this curriculum revision plan that would reduce the size of the major. There are so many ways in which Berkeley has gone way beyond pretty much all peer institutions that make me think that probably we outgrew what we're really capable of. Finally, I asked Professor Hugg if he thought we could rely on private funding to support the department. Typically, donors don't find it very fun to donate money in order to pay TAs or basically to keep the lights running just for like daily operations. I think donors tend to like to donate things like buildings and like new initiatives and not just paying the salaries that you're already paying. After talking with everyone, I got the sense that the computer science department in the next few years might look quite different than the one we have today. While I hope that the computer science department remains as large and diverse as it is now, it seems unlikely without drastic action from the university. I'm Lucy Huang with CalTV News.