Jill Jacobs-Biden EdD thesis, "Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students' Needs", Fall 2006.
She stated in the Overview, Page 2: "In an average-sized class of twenty students at Delaware Tech, for example, most of the seats will be filled with young students who have just graduated from high school. The majority of these will be female. At least five seats will be filled with middled-aged men and women who have lost their jobs due to downsizing and/or outsourced. One or two seats will be filled with students who have graduated from a GED program. Some seats will hold older women whose children have just entered college - now these women are taking the opportunity to earn a college degree themselves. Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; one seat will hold a Latino; and the remaining seats will be filled with students from Asian descent or non-resident aliens".
If the average class is 20 students and 3/4 (15 students) are Caucasian and 1/4 (5 students) are African American, how in the hell can another seat be held for a Latino and the remaining seats filled with students from Asian descent or non-resident aliens?
I have sat in on numerous doctoral thesis defenses and have learned that quoting statistical data as "most", "majority", "at least", "some" or the phrase, "one or two" is an automatic dismal of the student until such mathematical data is strongly supported in the argument...with those pesky numbers. However, seeing her use of ratios, I totally get why she did what she did.
Painful is the least and kindest thing you could have stated.