A dispatch from London about race in admissions to Oxford appears in the Times under the byline of Alan Cowell and with additional reporting credit from "Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, and Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin," for a grand total of five named Times staffers on an 1,100-word article.
The Times reports:
For some, the figures showed only halting progress: About 3 percent of the British population is black, according to the most recent census, but only 1.9 percent of the roughly 3,200 students admitted to Oxford in 2017 identified as black Britons.
That was an increase of less than a percentage point from 2013, when 1.1 percent of British undergraduates at Oxford identified as black, a subset of what the university called "black and minority ethnic" students, including those of Asian and mixed heritage, whose share of admissions rose to 17.9 percent last year, from 13.9 percent in 2013.
Well, "halting" is one way to look at it, a way reflected in the Times article. But another way to look at it is that the increase of "less than a percentage point" — to 1.9 percent from 1.1 percent — nonetheless reflects 73% growth over four years. If that trend continues, the "halting" description will soon seem inaccurate. A Times editor might argue that the "For some" part of the sentence excuses the rest of it — after all, "some" people really do see it that way. But the prominence in the article of the placement of that interpretation might cause a reader to suspect that those "some" include the Times editors and reporters, who are using the "for some" formulation as a thin cover to insert their own opinions into what's supposed to be a straight news article. Adjectives and adverbs — "halting," "reasonably" — and statistics are warning signs for editors. Or at least for some.
Incidentally, the Times also provides a baseline for comparison for the black students — "About 3 percent of the British population is black" — but not for the other categories. The CIA World Factbook says the U.K. population is 87.2% white, so if the CIA is counting the same way Oxford is, it's possible that at 17.9 % or 13.9%, minorities are actually over-represented at Oxford.