Review: Miracle Children

 Miracle Children is the story of T. M. Landry College Prep, a prep school for black children that became famous on social media to sending children to top Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell. It was then later discovered that the entire school was a sham, fabricating transcripts in place of classes, and teaching applicants to lie about their life experiences in order to make a more compelling application.

The book effectively reveals that the "Holistic admissions" process is a scam. There is simply no way for any school to effectively vet that what candidate submit as essays are the truth, nor do they actually care. In fact, these schools do not actually care about academic excellence or actually education:

“Princeton is a rich man’s college,” the university’s president Francis Landey Patton told the faculty when they complained about students’ behavior. “Rich men do not frequently come to college to study.” After Woodrow Wilson replaced Patton in 1902, vowing to raise academic standards, his wife quipped to The New York Evening Post that her husband was trying to destroy “the most agreeable and aristocratic country club in America by transforming it into an institution of learning.” But prep school students knew their success was ensured, regardless of how little they worked; in fact, in the early 1900s, more than half the boys admitted to Harvard and Yale and two-thirds of the boys admitted to Princeton had failed the entrance exams...Harvard capped its number of incoming freshmen, limiting the intake of students who passed the entrance test. Unable to take every academically qualified applicant, Harvard began to weigh non-academic qualities as part of the admissions process. It emphasized the importance of athleticism and good character to help maintain aristocratic, if not meritorious, classes. College interviews and feeder schools were all the more essential as admissions tools, as they helped officials weed out academically gifted but undesirable students. Wilbur Bender, the Harvard dean of admissions in the 1950s, argued for admitting students “with IQs well below others” because they became business executives, governors, and presidents, “our most distinguished and useful graduates.”(kindle loc 1109-1115)

What allowed Mike Landry to get away with all this for years was that Louisiana effectively allows private schools to be outside the jurisdiction of the department of education. This was because of segregation. By putting private schools outside of the jurisdiction of public supervision, these schools could discriminate as much as they liked, allowing parents to keep their white children from being forced to mingle with black children. However, that meant that Mike Landry's abuse of children or effective non-teaching of any kind of curriculum (later on, he focused on recruiting higher performing students rather than teaching the kids who joined at lower grades) could not be punished.

The elite college admissions offices are not setup to actually read applications very carefully:

In cases where the applicant attended a feeder school or one that admissions counselors have visited, the readers rely heavily on notes about those schools. “During my time inside admissions offices,” Selingo wrote, “I quickly discovered that the unit being evaluated was less often the applicant than the applicant’s high school.” Selingo cited a study by an admissions consulting firm that found that of 130,000 applicants to a brand-name college over a decade, just 18 percent of high schools were responsible for 75 percent of applications and 79 percent of acceptances. (kindle loc 2497)

What's even more damning was that after the fraud came out, the Ivy League schools closed ranks and refused to admit that they had done no vetting. They defended their admissions of students who had actively lied on their applications so the whole facade they had created about admitting "deserving" students had fallen apart.

 The Landrys “were selling to the colleges this perfect-package student, and to the parents, they were selling hope.” But colleges were also seeking out up-from-nothing tales, especially among minority candidates, and helping to create the conditions for a place like T.M. Landry to thrive. “The reality is the colleges weren’t interested in merely mortal children,” Stancil said. “They wanted miracle children.” The colleges involved defended the students they had accepted, continuing to support them even after the Times ran accounts of the Landrys’ abuse and fabrications. Wellesley said that the T.M. Landry graduates were “thriving and engaged.” George Washington University was confident that those who had been admitted “have the capability to succeed and graduate.” Harvard, Brown, Yale, and New York University also defended their students (kindle loc 2923)

After you've read this book, you'll wonder why elite schools in the US have the reputation they do. Recent surveys about how Americans are losing faith in the value of a college education start to make sense.