Both of John Simmons's parents went to Central Michigan University. Had he been a Notre Dame legacy, his stellar transcript would likely have gained him admission. But a relatively light load of advanced placement courses hindered him, and his test score fell short of the higher bar Notre Dame sets for unconnected applicants. The university's SAT average of 1394 for admitted students is artificially deflated by the lower scores of legacies, minorities, athletes, and other “special interests”; applicants without preference actually need a 1470 or so. “We don't jump at valedictorians” with SAT scores in the 1300s, said Daniel Saracino, Notre Dame's assistant provost for admissions.

  John—who applied to six Catholic colleges and was admitted to all but Notre Dame—opted for John Carroll University in Ohio, which awarded him almost a full scholarship. As of March 2006, he was a sophomore psychology major with an A average. He said he bears no grudge against Notre Dame, but “if I was designing the system, I wouldn't do it that way.” A degree from Notre Dame, he added, might have improved his chances of going to a top graduate school and embarking on a successful career in clinical practice. “As good as John Carroll is, it's not as well known,” he said. “Everybody knows Notre Dame.”

  Scott Merchant, director of college counseling at University of Detroit Jesuit High, said, “Whether you get admitted to a hypercompetitive school has no bearing on what type of student you are. You have to have some kind of a hook to get in at schools like Notre Dame. For some kids, it's being the child of an alum.

  “I still believe John deserved to get in there. The thing that impressed me about John—he wasn't only valedictorian of an extremely competitive academic school, he's also a tremendous human being. His outside interests and personal qualities are as high if not higher than his academic qualities. He could have gone anywhere and done well academically. He's also extremely religious and faith-oriented. He took the rejection a lot better than I would have.”

  Added John's mother, Kathy: “Notre Dame lost a great kid.”

  EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, including private universities, have been exempted from federal taxes since the income tax was introduced in 1913, and donations to them are tax-deductible. As tax-exempt institutions, they are prohibited from racial discrimination, and often profess to serve a greater social good by identifying and elevating students with leadership potential, regardless of race or income. Yet the legacies that so heavily populate their freshman classes are a singularly homogenous group—overwhelmingly white and rich. Only 7.6 percent of alumni child applicants whom Harvard admitted in 2002 were black, Hispanic, or Native American, compared with 17.8 percent of all successful applicants. One recent study found that 50 percent of legacy applicants to selective colleges boasted family incomes in the top 25 percent of American society, as against 39 percent of nonlegacy applicants. “Legacy preferences serve to reproduce the high-income/high-education/white profile that is characteristic of these schools,” former Princeton president William Bowen and two coauthors concluded in their 2005 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education.

  Thus, legacies are more likely to afford private high schools, tutors, test prep courses, and other perquisites that usually translate into higher test scores. Also, because it is widely agreed that parental education is one of the best predictors of pupil achievement, alumni children should be high achievers; by definition, they start with the advantage of having at least one college-educated parent. To equalize opportunity for applicants from less enriched backgrounds, alumni children would need to be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

  Nearly all private universities in the United States and some state schools give a substantial admissions edge to legacies. At some liberal arts colleges, legacies are even more prevalent than at Notre Dame. Alumni children account for nearly 40 percent of students at Calvin College, a Christian school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where President Bush gave the commencement address in 2005. At Ivy League and other elite schools, alumni sons and daughters typically make up 10 to 15 percent of the stu-dent body, often despite lesser academic credentials. Legacies are two to four times more likely to be accepted than other applicants, and many elite universities enroll more legacies than either African American or Hispanic students. Legacies, like minorities and recruited athletes, “have a decidedly better chance of being admitted, at any specified SAT level, than do other students,” Bowen and his coauthors found.

  To widen the pool of potential donors, some schools, like Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, give an edge to alumni grandchildren, siblings, nieces, and nephews. Davidson College, an elite liberal arts college in North Carolina, distinguishes between “direct legacies” (alumni children, stepchildren, and grandchildren) and “legacy-connected” applicants (siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews). Other institutions, such as Stanford, broaden their definition of alumni to include anyone who holds a degree from its graduate or professional schools, not just its undergraduate college.

  Legacies also catch a break since a high proportion of them apply to only one school—Mommy or Daddy's alma mater—under binding early decision programs. That's because they chose their college years before, or it was chosen for them, and they're too wealthy to have to worry about financial aid. (Applicants who commit early forfeit the chance to leverage one school's aid offer into more money from another.) Admission standards for early decision applicants are usually lower than for regular applicants because colleges sacrifice test-score points for the sake of raising their yield rates—the proportion of admitted students who enroll. The University of Pennsylvania explicitly links alumni child preference and early decision, urging alumni children and grandchildren to apply in the fall of their senior year for “maximum consideration for the legacy affiliation.” Penn admissions dean Lee Stetson explained, “If we're going to give them a measure of preference, it should be when they're making a commitment to us.”

  Out-of-staters need SAT scores 30-35 points higher than Virginia residents to enter the University of Virginia, a premier public university— unless they happen to be alumni children. The university groups out-of-state alumni children with in-state applicants, and Virginia dean of admissions John Blackburn made no bones about the reasons for the preference. “Our private support particularly from alumni is crucial to maintaining the quality of the institution,” he told me in 2003. “Legacy preference helps ensure that support by recognizing their financial contributions and their service on university committees and task forces.” Out-of-state alumni contributed the majority of $1.4 billion raised in a university fund drive.

  Alumni children enjoy special treatment at every stage of the admissions process, such as expert advice from college liaison offices, special tours and briefings from college administrators, reviews of applications by admissions directors, and, in the event that they're rejected, personal phone calls from university officials to ease the blow or recommend another school. The alumni office at Brown University has offered free college counseling for alumni children and grandchildren since 1994, while its counterpart at the University of Pennsylvania schedules and conducts admissions interviews for legacies. During homecoming weekend in November 2004, Amherst College provided an “overview of admission procedures” for alumni and their children.

  Alumni are heavily involved in admissions—and they take care of their own. Not only do alumni volunteers interview applicants for many schools, but college admissions offices frequently hire alumni for staff positions. Sooner or later, these staffers encounter an application from the son or daughter of an old college classmate or roommate. Fairness would seem to demand that staffers confronted with such a candidate disqualify themselves on the grounds of personal bias, just as a judge won't hear a case brought by a friend or neighbor. But such recusals aren't part of the clubby college admissions culture.

  To be sure, some alumni children have strong academic records that would warrant admission to a top university in any case. But the under-qualified are avoiding a steep tumble. Unlike athletes, development cases, and celebrity children, legacies enjoy a hook at only one or two colleges— those their parents attended. Competition for slots at selective American universities has become so intense that subpar legacies rejected by their parent's Ivy League alma mater may slide down to a second-or third-tier college.

  “With the legacy pool, those parents push the hardest, because it's the best shot they have,” said Lloyd Peterson, a former Yale admissions officer. “If those legacies don't get into Yale, they aren't getting into Harvard or Princeton. They're going two steps down. If it isn't Yale, it's probably the University of Connecticut, not Wesleyan. The parent's thinking, ‘I've got to go to the cocktail party Friday night and tell everybody my kid's going to UConn. That may cost me a contract.””

  For these lucky legacies, their undeserved college admission can be a passport to wealth, social status, and political power. According to Who's Running America?, an exhaustive study by Florida State University professor Thomas Dye, 54 percent of corporate leaders and 42 percent of governmental leaders hold degrees from twelve heavily endowed and prestigious private universities. By contrast, only 25 percent of the elite go to state universities.

  “You do know the friends you make at Harvard are going to help you somewhere down the line,” said Mary Anne Schwalbe, former associate director of admissions at Harvard. “The friends you make at Lewis and Clark College may not, although it's a perfectly good college.”

  No wonder that many alumni children feel a twinge of guilt over their admission to an elite college. “There's a self-doubt that creeps in,” said Deborah Perlman, a psychologist who has counseled legacies at Georgetown University. “You find a parallel feeling among minorities” benefiting from affirmative action. Princeton's alumni weekly published a letter in 2002 from her and her father, Theodore Perlman—both legacies at the university—advocating an end to legacy preference. “The greater good is to be found in equality of treatment,” they wrote.

  “I think I might have been a borderline student coming in here,” said Christopher Nanovic, a third-generation Notre Dame legacy whose family funded the Nanovic Institute for European Studies on campus. He and Kevin Desmond were living in the same dormitory, the aptly named Alumni Hall. “Legacy definitely helps. It's kind of a question in my mind— if I would be here without legacy preference. I'd like to think I would be.”

  LEGACY PREFERENCE has long drawn criticism from populists and civil rights advocates who decry admissions breaks for an upper-class and almost exclusively white group. But the anti-legacy ranks are widening. Ivy League dissenters include William Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton, who called for “tight limits” on legacy preferences in his 2005 book. Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Harvard legacy himself, filed a bill in 2003 requiring colleges to divulge data on alumni child admissions.

  Even some mainstream Republican opponents of affirmative action for minorities have reluctantly joined the attack, recognizing that to be consistent they have to oppose affirmative action for wealthy whites as well. Thus former CIA director Robert Gates, now president of Texas A&M University, abolished both affirmative action and legacy preference there. President George W Bush, a third-generation legacy at Yale—his daughter Barbara represented the fourth Bush generation there—told an audience of black journalists during the 2004 campaign that admissions should be merit-based and there should be “no special exception for certain people.” He was echoing popular sentiment; a May 2004 poll in the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 75 percent of Americans disagree with giving “extra consideration for admission” to alumni relatives.

  So do many Europeans, even in class-conscious England. Just as the House of Lords has been stripped of power over the years, neither Oxford nor Cambridge asks applicants whether their parents are alumni, and any intimation of favoritism toward the upper classes prompts a storm of protest. Although Prime Minister Tony Blair graduated from Oxford, it turned down his son Euan in 2002, due to a C in French. He enrolled at the less prestigious Bristol University instead.

  Yet, repudiating the popular will, not a single U.S. private college or university has dropped legacy preference. Colleges cling to the preference on the grounds that it is essential to their financial health. Alumni contributed $7.1 billion to higher education in 2005, representing 27.7 percent of all private giving to colleges, according to the Council for Aid to Education. Some of that money, no doubt, is given out of charity, with no concern for a son's or daughter's admission. But much is either donated in thanks for children already admitted to the alma mater, or in the expectation that a sizeable check will smooth a future acceptance.

  “Without legacy preference, there would be a significant decrease in giving from a core body of traditional support—families in which at least a second generation has gone to the institution,” said Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education, a Washington lobbying group.

  Such dire predictions are highly debatable. There's no doubt that some alumni, counting on the admissions break, do fume when their children are turned down. On learning of his daughter's rejection by Princeton in 2002, R. J. Innerfield ‘67 composed an overwrought poem, entitled “WestCollegeioma,” for the Princeton Alumni Weekly: “A cancer creeps insidiously here / Within our midst and masquerades about / Destroying as it does the very dear attachment / We can't bear to be without.” Another Princeton graduate, Richard Hokin ‘62, stopped giving to his alma mater after it turned away two daughters several years ago. “I took it as a personal affront,” said Hokin, chairman of Intermountain Industries Inc., an Idaho natural gas distributor.

  Significantly, Hokin didn't stop donating to higher education. Instead, he redirected his giving to Brown and Northwestern, the institutions his daughters attended. Princeton's loss was their gain.

  Hokin's behavior suggests that, contrary to the doomsayers” predictions, higher education would thrive even if legacy preference were abolished. If fewer legacies were admitted, alumni might give less money to their own alma maters—but more to their children's.

  Plus, if legacy preference were eliminated, alumni such as Hokin might be less offended when their children are rejected. The exorbitant rates at which legacies are admitted raise parental hopes; alumni expect their children to be admitted, even with inferior academic qualifications. An end to legacy preference would mitigate both alumni expectations and their ensuing disappointment.

  In any case, once their immediate anger over a child's rebuff subsides, alumni loyalty proves remarkably resilient. Mary Anne Schwalbe said one of her tasks at Harvard was to console alumni whose children were turned down. Nine out often times, she said, the parents would reply to her letters with reassurances that they weren't upset. One alumnus, whose family had given a building to Harvard, called her after his grandson had gotten the bad news and said, “I couldn't agree with you more.”

  LEGACY PREFERENCE at U.S. colleges is a relatively modern phenomenon. It emerged less than a century ago, largely for an unsavory reason: suppressing Jewish enrollment.

  Before World War I, while the tradition of alumni donating to their alma mater was already established, their children did not require admissions preference. Even top colleges such as Harvard and Yale accepted all comers who could pass exams in Latin and other subjects—mainly affluent white Protestant students from private schools. By virtue of money and background, graduates of the most prestigious boarding schools ruled the colleges” social scene, dominating Princeton's upper-class eating clubs and Harvard's finals clubs, and cementing relationships that would buttress their subsequent careers in business or politics.

  After the war, better transportation, improved public schools, and the impact of decades of European immigration combined to threaten this close-knit Yankee world. The number of applicants soared as more public school graduates began clamoring for Ivy educations and outperforming prep schoolers on newfangled standardized tests. Many such budding scholars were Jews—not only children of assimilated, wealthy German Jews but those of less educated, Yiddish-speaking peasants from Poland and Russia. The proportion of Jewish undergraduates at Harvard tripled from 7 percent in 1900 to 21.5 percent in 1922; at Columbia, Jewish enroll-ment neared 40 percent by 1918. As their numbers mounted, these Jewish students were often ostracized on campus, barred from athletic teams and extracurricular clubs.

  In response to panic among alumni on whose wallets they depended, the universities considered three options. First, they could expand to accommodate all minimally qualified applicants, which was bound to dilute their cachet. Second, they could limit admissions to top students based on grades and test scores. But in that case brilliant Jews and other newcomers, many from impoverished circumstances and needing financial aid, would displace academically mediocre alumni children. “Aside from their disdain for socially undesirable Jewish applicants, alumni were concerned that their own children might not be accepted under tighter admissions standards,” David O. Levine wrote in The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915-1940.

  Since both those strategies seemed unsatisfactory, the colleges devised a third: restricting admissions based on criteria that did not appear discriminatory but would have the effect of reducing Jewish enrollment. A prime example was Dartmouth College, which in 1922 developed admissions guidelines based not just on a candidate's academic potential but on such factors as character, athletic prowess, geographic distribution (designed to curb the number of students from New York City, where Jews and other immigrants were concentrated), and alumni status: “All properly qualified sons of Dartmouth alumni… shall be admitted.” In another concession to alumni, they were allowed to interview applicants and weigh in on admissions decisions—a practice that remains widespread.

  Presaging future debates, “critics asserted that the plan was a subterfuge to justify the selection of alumni children and athletes,” Levine wrote.