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While there certainly are some humanities students who get support - most of them do not receive full support from their institution. Typically, half time TA with no tuition coverage. This can also be the case for engineering PhDs at some institutions. Almost all science PhD students are typically guaranteed 2 years TA plus tuition even at the very smallest schools. In addition, non-STEM related PhDs take longer (about 1.5 years longer at the median). This leads to more student loan debt for non-STEM PhDs compared to STEM PhDs. Please see this study for a very nice comparison: The Price of a Science PhD

In addition, you make what I believe to be two assumptions by implication about Universities:
1. That professors are hired to teach.
2. That TAs will do a worse job teaching than professors.

Professors are NOT hired to teach - the exception is small private colleges without graduate programs. Professors are hired to bring research money into the University. The University takes in the region of 40-60% off the top of grants "for institutional research support." While this is not always the case (for some grants, the granting institution require the university to commit matching funds) it is more than the norm. Secondly, while professors are typically more knowledgeable in the subject and typically have more experience teaching (by virtue of spending the time as a TA during graduate school), that does not mean they are the better teachers. The best teachers I ever had were evenly split between professors and TAs. While not scientific, my colleagues experiences were similar.

You're wrong on both accounts. That is, with regard to math education at least. Click here and scroll down to page 8. Then check out page 22 paragraph 2.

At grades 4 and 8 U.S. students out-perform their peers in Italy, New Zealand and Norway. The situation isn't as good at age 15, but U.S. students still out-perform their peers in Italy and Russia. So you'll have to back up your claim that the U.S. has the "worst public school system among developed countries". How is it worse than Italy's?

The report also claims that, along with the United States, Australia and Belgium do not have a national math curriculum. That suggests to me that curriculum is set either by province, by smaller school districts, or by individual schools.

I don't believe the report lists the colleges involved, but there were over 1800 students from about 80 colleges.

http://www.air.org/news/default.aspx#pew

... it's nearly everyone.

Apparently including journalists. In a move that should surprise nobody, the reporter who wrote the article doesn't seem to have bothered to look at the data, and relied on the pre-digested summary instead. If you bother to look at the Appendix to the report, which is just a few mouse clicks away for anyone who is interested, it turns out that the college students did substantially better than the population at large.

What's particularly interesting is that they also had a comparison of current college students with college graduates. The current students did better than graduates in all areas of the test. Their average scores were higher, a lower pecentage of them were in the lowest score categories, and a higher percentage were in the highest score categories, with the exception of one test where the 2 year college graduates managed a tie with the current 2 year students.

It would be at least as honest to report the results as saying that current college students are better equipped for daily life than the population at large. But that wouldn't be alarming enough. More importantly, it wouldn't play to the prejudices of the audience, who want to believe that things are going to hell.

Sample questions from the survey are available as a PDF download from the American Institutes for Research website.

I skimmed through the appendix from the report on the American Institutes for Research webpage (http://www.air.org/news/default.aspx#pew), and while they don't explicity say what universities, here's what they have to say for themselves:

The NSACS assessment was administered to a nationally representative sample of 1,827 students across eighty 2- and 4-year institutions. The NSACS sample was a two-stage, stratified random sample with the first stage of selection a sample of degree-granting 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions and the second stage of selection a sample of students in their last year of a degree at these institutions. Institutions were selected through a systematic random sampling procedure, with sampling probabilities proportionate to size (PPS). The measure of size was the number of full- and part-time degree-seeking students in either their second year and up (for 2-year institutions) or their fourth year and up (for 4-year institutions), as measured by the 1998-1999 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) dataset. Explicit strata were defined by 2-year/4-year status.

The second stage of selection consisted of a sample of full- and part-time degree-seeking students at 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions who had accumulated enough credits to be eligible to graduate in spring 2003. The sampling design was a stratified systematic random sample. The alphabet as applied to the last and first name of students was used as an implicit stratifying variable.

Of particular interest are the following:

• Inform parents and listen to them when early warning signs are observed.
• Maintain confidentiality and parents' rights to privacy.
• Develop the capacity of staff, students, and families to intervene.

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-Esme