Amid a decline in acceptance rates at prestigious universities, T.M. Landry College Preparatory Academy in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana guaranteed college admissions by “trading on racial stereotypes” of Black students, according to journalist Erica L. Green at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
Following their original article published in The New York Times in 2018, investigative reporter Katie Benner and Green published “Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises” in 2026.
The book outlines the T.M. Landry school admissions scandal in 2018 that launched a state investigation into child abuse and federal investigation into falsified college applications.
The journalists explained T.M. Landry did not have an official curriculum and relied on independent student learning and rote memorization of test material. Because of this, students were often many grade-levels behind their public and private school peers.
To compensate, students applied to college with falsified transcripts and embellished personal essays and recommendation letters.
T.M. Landry students “felt that they needed to lie about their lives for opportunity” and were forced to apply to preassigned universities a year early with fabricated transcripts and tampered personal essays, Benner said.
“[The students are] reflecting deeply on a country that not only seems to encourage this kind of deception and scam, but that rewards people for it,” Benner said.
T.M. Landry students also reported physical violence and emotional abuse, including allegations that the school’s founder Michael Landry placed a developmentally disabled boy in a closet and hit elementary school students with a belt.
Since 2010, the acceptance rate for Ivy League schools decreased from 10.4% to 5.09% in 2025. At the time of the T.M. Landry scandal, the average acceptance rate to Ivy League schools was less than 7%.
“If you’re wealthy, you can buy a building and put your family’s name on it, and that is how you’re going to get into college,” Benner said. “Why was it for Black students that the way they were going to get in was trading in their dignity and allowing themselves to be objects of pity for … white institutions?”
In 2018, when Green and Benner’s article was published, 10.1% of freshman matriculating at Harvard University that year were Black or African American. On October 15 that same year, Harvard went to trial for a lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian-American applicants.
“These [Ivy League] schools were created not for the best and brightest; they were created for the wealthiest and whitest,” Green said. “It’s about what the country deems as valuable and who they deem as valuable and what opportunities are afforded to them.”
One semester later, in 2019, a college admissions scandal exposed 50 people of “falsifying a student’s test scores or fabricating their athletic status,” according to a New York Times article. The case involved Yale University, Stanford University and other universities, leading to the Varsity Blues trial in 2021.
“They were gaming a rigged system. And it was just so coincidental, yet divine that system … got exposed in such an explosive way just a few months after this story came out,” Green said.
While Benner and Green signed on to write “Miracle Children” at the end of 2019, the pandemic pushed the project until 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action.
Following the ruling, there was a decline in the enrollment of Black and Hispanic or Latinx students along with an increase in Asian students at universities that previously considered race in the admissions process.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology saw a 10% drop in Black students. Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale saw smaller changes. More incoming freshmen declined to state their race in their college applications.
In 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Harvard, Yale and Princeton University saw a decrease in Black students in the incoming class of 2029 with Princeton showing the largest decrease of 4%.
“Education is always the battleground for civil rights,” Green said. “This is a real moment where the country has decided what kind of America it wants, who belongs in it and who has power in it.”