Accepted: behind a US college admissions scandal and the students affected

‘Too often in our society, we think of educating black children as a philosophic enterprise. We see education as a gift to be bestowed upon black students instead of a public good to be accessed.’ Photograph: Greenwich Entertainment

The viral videos all had the same format: a black student sits at a nondescript table, nervously hovering over a laptop, surrounded by a phalanx of mostly black students, phone cameras at the ready to capture the moment. When the students from TM Landry, an unorthodox private high school in rural Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, see the acceptance emails – to Harvard, Dartmouth, Wellesley and other top-tier universities not usually open to working-class, minority students – they erupt into cheers, a euphoric mass grasping at the student who got the golden ticket.

TM Landry, founded by married couple Mike and Tracey Landry in their kitchen in 2005, produced several of these videos in 2016 and 2017, drawing national media attention. The videos, stitched together in the early minutes of Accepted, a new documentary on TM Landry and the warped Monopoly game of higher education, offered a seemingly hopeful, feelgood message, one echoed on the Today Show, CBS This Morning, Michelle Obama’s Twitter account and Ellen DeGeneres’s talkshow: here was a miracle school launching black students to their dream schools. TM Landry had, against precipitous odds, figured out a way in.