The Bunns are part of a close-knit group of families in affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, that has dominated the higher echelons of Duke's parent fund-raising committee. The suburban network illustrates how the wealthy, by operating in tandem, exert influence over the college admissions process as if choosing members for an exclusive country club—inevitably muscling out working-class applicants and other outsiders.

  In addition to Maude's father, Lake Forest luminaries on the committee have included department-store heir Marshall Field V, who has given six figures to Duke; Paul Clark, chief executive of Icos Corp., a biotech firm; and Robert DePree, chairman of cornmeal maker House-Autry Mills Inc. Bunn, Clark, and DePree and their spouses were all committee cochairs for their children's classes. (Billionaire William Wrigley Jr., a Duke alumnus and donor, also lives in Lake Forest.)

  Asked why he is on the committee, one Lake Forest father said, “It's important to give one's time and resources to help worthy nonprofit institutions. At Duke, the endowment is smaller than its peer institutions, yet the school's performance consistently ranks in the top 10. They're doing a great job with the dollars they have.

  “Plus, they've delivered for my daughter.”

  The Lake Forest couples are social friends, serve on many of the same Chicago-area boards, and typically send their children to the same private elementary school, Lake Forest Country Day. They write recommendations to Duke for each other's children. Once a child from this network is admitted to Duke, his or her parents typically join the parents committee, donate to the university, and vouch for the children of friends and neighbors when they apply. In Lake Forest, not fulfilling these obligations would be considered as rude as forgetting to RSVP to a wedding. At Duke, their children maintain the ties; the daughters of Field, Clark, and DePree, for instance, all joined the same sorority.

  “It perpetuates itself,” Ashley Clark told me. “It was nice knowing older girls in my sorority.”

  Susan DePree, Robert's wife, told me that the Lake Forest parents have assumed key responsibilities on the Duke committee because they are accustomed to and expert at organizing and raising money for civic causes. The committee, she said, is a “pretty intimate group” but not “clubby.” It has unusual access to Duke administrators, including briefings from Christoph Guttentag.

  “We're just passing along this job,” Mrs. Bunn said. “Those of us in Lake Forest were all on a lot of the same boards in Chicago. There's some perception that we can get the job done. We have gotten the job done pretty well.”

  Lake Forest wasn't always a Duke stronghold. James Gorter, retired chair of investment management firm Baker Fentress—the same man for whom Joel Fleishman conducted an anniversary wine tasting—remembered that “there were very few people from Lake Forest going to Duke” when his daughter, Mary, enrolled there in 1977 (followed by his late son Kevin, a 1987 graduate). Gorter, who said Duke wasn't aware of his business stature when Mary applied, did his part to enlarge the Lake Forest pipeline, joining the parent committee, endowing a professorship, and recommending children of his friends.

  “We got to know a lot of the people there not only in the admissions department but also in the fund-raising groups,” said Gorter. “They're very caring, which I don't think is true in all educational institutions. I really believe there is a much greater caring for and responsiveness at Duke if you recommend somebody. Even if they don't take them, they tell you why. They go out of their way to make sure they tell you exactly what's going on. Parents are very important to Duke. It's a very family-oriented place.”

  Gorter said his batting average on recommendations was “pretty good.” Among those he backed was Abigail Field, Marshall Field's daughter. Field, in his turn, recommended Maude Bunn, as did the Clarks.

  “We have a lot of family friends who have kids above me at Duke,” Maude explained when I interviewed her in 2003, during her sophomore year. “They wanted to help me out and write letters and stuff. After I got in, my parents were asked to do fund-raising for Duke and they were saying, ‘Yeah, we owe it to all these people.””

  Maude, who was studying art history and anticipating a career in fashion, told me she initially felt “very, very awkward” at Duke because her admission “wasn't necessarily on my own merits.” But she soon adjusted. “The more time I've spent here, I feel more and more confident—they didn't have to take me if they didn't think I was equal to all the other students they are admitting. I'm doing just as well as everybody I know if not better.” She graduated from Duke in 2005 with a bachelor of arts degree.

  In 2004, yet another child from the same Lake Forest circle entered Duke: Josephine Terlato, from a prominent wine distributing and producing family. Her grandfather, Anthony Terlato, chairman of Terlato Wine Group, was an early importer of pinot grigio to the United States. Her father, William, a graduate of Loyola University in Chicago, is president of Terlato Wine Group and Paterno Wines International, which markets one out of every ten bottles of wine over $14 sold in America, according to its website. Like the Clarks and other Duke parents, the Terlatos have been active on behalf of Lake Forest Country Day.

  At Lake Forest High, a premier public school, Josephine Terlato was in the top 15 to 20 percent of her class, qualifying for the National Honor Society but not the Cum Laude Society, which is limited to the top 9 to 12 percent there. Her SAT and ACT scores, she said, were “right in the norm for Duke.” She applied early, was deferred to the regular pool, and then admitted. She was also accepted at Georgetown and the University of Michigan but was turned down by Columbia University and Boston College.

  She wrote her essay about the family business—perhaps alerting admissions readers to her affluent upbringing. “I started getting involved a few years ago by going to wineries we own in Napa Valley and France and working there,” she said. “I talked about how I've grown up in that type of culture.”

  Josephine said she knows the Fields, Bunns, and other Duke families but didn't solicit their recommendations. “My recommendations were all from teachers and people I had worked with in community service,” she said. “I thought that if I were going to get in, I would want to be assured I could handle the workload and what was expected of me as a student.” A few months after she was admitted, her parents joined Duke's fund-raising committee—at the invitation, Josephine said, of the Bunns.

  The show business headliners of yesteryear rarely made a fuss about their children's schooling. They gave them tap shoes and singing lessons and put them on the stage or screen as soon as they were old enough to remember their parts. By contrast, today's pop culture icons, from Kevin Costner to Bette Midler, send their young to exclusive prep schools and premier colleges, most of which make academic allowances for celebrity children. Thus the glitterati parlay transient name recognition—the fifteen minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol—into a secure position in America's aristocracy. For Hollywood celebrities, “It's not that their son or daughter is getting a great education,” says James Rogers, former director of admission at Brown. “It's how much they can puff their chests at a Beverly Hills cocktail party.”

  Depicted in a February 1998 article in Vanity Fair as the “School for Glamour,” Brown University is the elite college best known for pursuing scions of the famous. And rarely has Brown sacrificed academic standards for Hollywood luster more blatantly than it did in courting power broker Michael Ovitz.

  In October 2004, Michael Ovitz was getting skewered nationwide. His former employer, Walt Disney Co., was on trial, sued by shareholders who were furious that it had paid him $140 million in severance for a fourteen-month stint as president. His former Disney boss and close friend, Michael Eisner, had described him in one memo that surfaced in the case as a “psychopath” who “cannot tell the truth.”

  But on Brown's hillside campus in Providence, Rhode Island, Ovitz's cinematic clout insulated him from criticism. If the former talent agent who cofounded Creative Artists Agency no longer reigned in Hollywood, he could still dazzle Rhode Island with his Rolodex—and burnish his crumbling reputation with an Ivy League luster. On the evening of Saturday, October 23, nearly three thousand students and parents overflowed Brown's basketball gym, filling the grandstands and folding chairs set up on the floor, to hear Ovitz banter with longtime friend and client Dustin Hoffman. Ovitz had invited the movie star, whom he addressed as “Dusty,” to Brown. The event—billed as “A Conversation with Dustin Hoffman, Moderated by Michael Ovitz”—was the culminating attraction of Parents” Weekend. It offered an intimate glimpse of celebrity likely to leave parents grateful and inclined to donate.

  Three giant screens behind the speakers magnified their contrasting images. Ovitz looked scholarly in a conservative suit, while Hoffman wore corduroys and an open-necked shirt, with his glasses slipping down to the end of his nose. As master of ceremonies, Ovitz bowed to Brown (“Every single time I'm on this campus, I'm invigorated by the creativity and individuality”) and described the importance of risk taking to the creative process (“There is no success without multiple failure”). He also led applause for Dusty's film clips, off-color stories, reminiscences about schooling (“Nobody flunks acting, it's like gym”), and advice for President Bush (“Go to the shrink!”). In return, Hoffman alluded to the shareholder lawsuit only to praise his “friend for twenty-five years”: “Whatever his controversies have been … he protected the artist.”

  Brown president Ruth Simmons also saluted the mogul-turned-moderator. She described Ovitz as the “exemplar of a Brown parent who, without being asked, comes forward to help.”

  In reality, the renowned deal maker didn't have to be asked to bring Hoffman, because Ovitz owed Brown a favor. Like Disney, the Ivy League university paid dearly for Ovitz—not in cash, but in college admissions. Ovitz might never have become, in President Simmons's words, “a true friend to Brown” if the university had not made an admissions exception for the eldest of his three children.

  In promoting the event on its website, Brown described Ovitz as “P’05”—in other words, parent of Brown senior Kimberly Ovitz, who sat in the front row. President Simmons herself singled out Kimberly for praise, crediting her with suggesting Hoffman's appearance. But Kimberly was not the first Ovitz child to attend Brown; her brother Christopher held that distinction. Despite a mediocre academic record and a middle-school suspension for swinging a baseball bat at a female classmate, Christopher Ovitz applied to Brown from a Santa Monica, California, prep school in 1999. His candidacy prompted intense debate within the university's administration over how far it should bend standards even for the son of the man often called the most powerful in Hollywood. With Brown ever eager to boost its endowment, then as now the Ivy League's lowest, then-president E. Gordon Gee and his development staff pushed for Christopher. In the end, Christopher was admitted as a “special student,” a rarely used designation that required him to pass some classes before the university committed to enrolling him as a full undergraduate.

  Chris lasted less than a year at Brown, but the university soon reaped the benefits of his admission. In January 2003, Michael Ovitz emceed his first campus conversation with an A-list celebrity, director Martin Scorsese. Ovitz hailed his longtime client as “a man who never compromised” and “the greatest filmmaker we have today.” Nine hundred students packed the auditorium and four hundred more were turned away. The following winter, Ovitz hosted a reception for Simmons at his Brentwood mansion, adorned with his superb collection of modern art. Among the guests were Brown parents Hoffman and Danny DeVito.

  Brown administrators hoped that the standing ovation for Hoffman and Ovitz at Parents” Weekend would ultimately yield a more tangible asset. As President Simmons reminded the crowd, Brown parents “are among the most generous in the country.” Hoffman's parting remark to the audience appeared to reflect an awareness that Brown's flexible admissions standards had made the evening possible. Hoffman told the student body, “Some of you worked harder than others to get here. Some of you, not unlike myself in high school, didn't work that hard.”

  CELEBRITY CHILDREN, such as Christopher Ovitz and his Hollywood peers, don't have to work that hard to be admitted to most elite universities. Just as they command the best table at a restaurant or front-row seats at a premier sports event, so they expect—and receive—special attention from starstruck colleges. So too with well-known teenage actors and models. Child actors whose cuteness had faded used to scrounge for parts in TV commercials and B movies; now, like Wonder Years star Fred Savage and his brother Ben of Boy Meets World, they go to Stanford.

  And their good fortune has consequences. The vast majority of precocious stars and celebrity offspring are well-off whites, tipping the socio-economic scale at top-tier colleges further toward the privileged. Every academically weak child of a sitcom stalwart or TV newscaster admitted takes the place of a brighter student from a more anonymous background.

  Universities don't have a separate preference category for teen celebrities, who constitute a small number of applicants in any given year. Instead, they're treated as a subset of development admits. Whether famous in their own right or their parents’, they're lumped in with children of business tycoons or corporate directors on the list that the fund-raising office provides to admissions.

  For instance, New York University's development list includes applicants it calls “notables,” mostly from the spheres of entertainment and politics. “You look at the application and Daddy is a leading playwright or a Hollywood producer,” said Barbara Hall, associate provost for enrollment management. “You pick up on those. If it's a close call, the decision will go in favor of the student.” Among recent notables at NYU: omnipresent twin actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. “Politically, it's the astute thing to do,” Hall added. “You don't want the president to go to a meeting in Washington and find out he's denied the child of the Speaker of the House and he didn't know it.”

  While universities pursue other development cases with a view to a parental donation, that's not the primary reason why they lower standards for celebrity children. Most celebrities are not major donors to higher education and have often frustrated colleges that hope otherwise. With a few exceptions—such as Bill Cosby, who with his wife, Camille, gave $20 million to Spelman College in 1989—they're used to lending their names rather than wallets to social causes. They also tend to maintain expensive lifestyles and are solicited by so many organizations that they don't build close relationships with any of them. “The glitterati of that sort are more than happy to appear at your dinner and be honored at a major event, but they are not terribly generous as a group,” said Terry Holcombe, former vice president for development and alumni affairs at Yale. “They have a million excuses.”

  For colleges, celebrity is a coin of the realm, convertible into prestige and publicity. Premier universities look to these children to generate attention—the favorable buzz that can boost applications, draw coverage in People magazine and other media, thrill alumni, and turn a place such as Brown into a “hot” school despite a lagging endowment and blue-collar surroundings. Children of the famous carry with them the aura of their parents, of course, but they do more than that: they bring their parents in tow. In the incessant academic competition for newsworthy speakers at commencement exercises and other ceremonies, colleges often grab the limelight and one-up their rivals by enlisting celebrity parents, who interrupt their busy schedules and waive their usually hefty fees in gratitude to the institutions that admitted their children.

  “There are a lot of really rich people. It's not the richness schools are looking for, necessarily, it's the cachet,” said Seppy Basili, vice president of learning and assessment at Kaplan Inc., the test-prep company. The speaker at Basili's own graduation from Kenyon College in 1982 was actor Alan Alda, whose daughter also graduated that year.

  College counselors say that celebrity status is worth at least 100 SAT points at Brown and other selective colleges. Vincent Garcia, counselor at Campbell Hall School in North Hollywood, a popular prep school for movie industry families, said college admissions representatives who visit Campbell Hall to speak to prospective applicants and their families are sometimes “unnerved” and “overwhelmed” by the presence of celebrity parents whom they've idolized. If a university has a strong filmmaking or television program, he said, parents who are directors or screenwriters often enhance their son or daughter's chances by offering to share their expertise if their child is admitted.

  “It's usually communicated by the parent to the college development office or even to the film department,” Garcia told me. “The parent would meet with the director of a particular department and say, ‘I'd really love to play an active role in helping you with the students who have questions, or come on campus and talk about my experience transitioning from acting to directing.’”

  Foremost among Campbell Hall celebrities were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Neither was inducted into the school's Cum Laude Society, signifying they did not rank in the top 15 to 20 percent of their class at Campbell Hall. Yet both enrolled at New York University, where 63 percent of freshmen are in the top tenth of their high school classes. When they were choosing a college, “I got more attention from admissions directors than I ever had before,” Garcia says.

  Michael Pagnotta, a publicist for the Olsen twins, said they did “quite well” academically in prep school, but declined to be more specific. “When colleges examined their achievements not just as actresses but as business-people and fashion designers, the admissions people felt it would be terrific to have them,” he said. In October 2005, Mary-Kate took a leave of absence from NYU, which Pagnotta said was unrelated to academics.

  Colleges accommodate celebrity children every step of the way. They're treated like guests at a four-star hotel with university officials acting as concierge. Rather than being interviewed by an underling, these students may meet with the university president or admissions dean. When Steven Spielberg's stepdaughter, Jessica Capshaw, sought an interview with Duke University, she didn't even have to leave her home. Duke admissions director Christoph Guttentag, explaining that he happened to be in California anyway, made a beeline for the Spielberg residence and interviewed her there. Despite this house call, Jessica—described by people familiar with her record as “reasonably well qualified” and “perfectly solid” but not an academic standout—enrolled at Brown in 1994.