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That class size statistic is very misleading because it weighs a class with 20 students the same as a class with many more students, even though many more students will experience the larger size since it holds more. To give a contrived example, suppose TinyU has 4 classes of 250 students and 4 classes of 10 students. Just about everyone at TinyU is in a class of 250, yet TinyU can proudly say that 50% of its classes have 10 students or less.</p>
<p>To show what this means for UCLA, there are around 28,000 undergrads. If each student takes 4 classes, then UCLA must provide 112,000 classroom seats every quarter. Looking at the UCLA Common Data Set there are 480 classes with 2-9 students and 564 classes with 10-19. Even if we put as many kids as possible in each of these small classes, the UCLA classes with 19 students or less only provide 15,000 classroom seats. Since UCLA needs 112,000 seats it is clear that the experience of 50% of the students is not a class with 20 students or less.</p>