Did Michelle Obama get the necessary permission to contact, interview or survey these "subjects" of her research? My wife did interviews of a minority people for her PhD thesis and had to go through all sorts of hoops in order to have the permission needed to do research on humans subjects.
Michelle's tortured grammar would certainly have caused her committee to reject the thesis and have it re-written. Again my wife spent most of a year writing her thesis and had to go through numerous re-writes because one or more of her committee members didn't like the way a section was written. I had the same experience in writing my masters thesis.
I don't think the paper the article is referring to is a Master's thesis. Princeton requires undergraduates to write a thesis. I have seen portions of it on the Internet and it is a mess anyway you look at it,but I don't think she got a master's degree from Princeton.