While steam from hundreds of grills wafted over the lot, John unfolded chairs and tables and laid out his family's feast: beer, soda, chicken, brownies, and chips and salsa piled high in a blue-and-gold football helmet. The strains of the “Notre Dame Victory March” blared through the Caddy's open front doors as dozens of relatives and friends, recognizing the flag, began showing up.

  John's brother Greg, a Chicago real estate salesman and 1990 alumnus, commuted to the game from a cottage he bought on a nearby lake “so I could be only half an hour from this parking space.” He was accompanied by his longtime partner, also a Notre Dame graduate. “I didn't marry a girl from Notre Dame,” Greg said. “That's as close as I'll get.”

  Wearing jeans, sandals, and a green “We Are ND” T-shirt, Kevin Desmond joined the group. Slim and brown-haired, with an engaging smile, he said he hadn't slept much since the pep rally the night before. Alumni Hall was a “host dorm” at the rally, and Kevin was among its delegation that hooted and hollered every time a speaker mentioned the word alumni, which was often. Kevin introduced me to another Alumni Hall resident and third-generation legacy, Nick Cottingham—Mike's son. Nick, who went to high school in Wyoming, scored 1350 on his SATs. One of his high school friends, who was not a legacy, was “a little upset” about being rejected by Notre Dame while Nick got in, until Nick told him about the university's commitment to alumni children. “I definitely think he understood it,” Nick said. “Legacy is great. Legacies grow up with a sense of tradition.”

  Nick said his older brother, who graduated in 2004, “got me into Alumni.” Now, he and Kevin were planning to room together next year as sophomores. Legacies often become friends, he said, because they have “a little more in common.”

  AS NOTRE DAME dynasties go, the Abowds reign supreme. The late Richard George Abowd Jr., a 1949 Notre Dame graduate and Ford Motor Company engineer who died in 1998, sired a dozen children. All twelve were admitted to Notre Dame, ten enrolled, and nine graduated, setting a one-generation record; there was an Abowd in the Notre Dame student body every year from 1969 to 1990—not counting other family branches stemming from Richard's brother and brother-in-law, both Notre Dame alumni as well. But now, as the next generation of Abowds begins to apply to college, legacy preference is dividing the family into haves and have-nots.

  On the same October day that the Desmond family tailgated before the Notre Dame football game, the Abowds held a family reunion after it. It was attended by Richard's widow, Sara, five of their nine children with Notre Dame degrees, and numerous grandchildren. The reunion, in a hotel several miles from campus, was catered by Chili's, but Sara insisted on bringing her specialties—delectable Lebanese meat and spinach pies. She and her husband, both from Lebanese immigrant families, were not wealthy; they scrimped to send their children to Notre Dame with the help of scholarships. When their last child, Paula, graduated from Notre Dame in 1990, the university honored them at commencement. Asked what made her proudest, Sara wiped away a tear and said, “They all kept their faith.”

  Most of the twelve Abowd children had outstanding high school records. Eight were valedictorians. The eldest, John, was a National Merit Scholar; he edited the student newspaper at Notre Dame and is an economics professor at Cornell. John, whose wife and brother-in-law also graduated from Notre Dame, maintained that the university's abundance of alumni children “has nothing to do with scores. It's all about social networks, people self-selecting to go to a place where they feel comfortable. They could have gone to lots of places.” Another brother, Gregory, was a Rhodes scholar and became a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech.

  Still, two of their siblings at the reunion, Steven and Peter, said they likely needed the legacy boost. “I think legacy worked for me,” said Peter, an engineer developing software for car radios. “I wasn't a valedictorian. I was a decent student.” One of his accomplishments at Notre Dame, Peter recalled, was producing a blue-and-gold 45-rpm record, “100 Years,” in 1987 commemorating a century of Notre Dame football. Peter composed and performed the song, which sold three hundred copies on campus and played for years on the jukebox in the Huddle, a student hangout.

  Steven, the sixth to graduate from Notre Dame, confided that he was admitted off the waiting list. “I was lucky to get in, and I appreciate it,” said Steven, a business analyst. He added that he had a B or B-minus average at Notre Dame. “They knew what they were doing when they put me on the wait list.”

  All twelve children likely would have enrolled at Notre Dame if not for their father's old-fashioned attitudes. Believing girls did not belong there, Richard refused to send his first two daughters, Elizabeth and Marypat, to Notre Dame, which had only recently become coeducational. They enrolled instead at Marygrove, a Catholic women's college in Michigan. Sara recalled that she wanted them to go to Notre Dame—and even sent in Elizabeth's deposit on her housing and obtained a room number for her— but Richard would not yield. He later relented, and their three younger sisters did graduate from Notre Dame.

  Now, as Richard and Sara's thirty-four grandchildren start applying to college, his long-ago reservations about coeducation are coming back to haunt them, underscoring the capricious nature of legacy preference. Notre Dame accepted John's daughter, Katherine, whose parents are both alumni. Katherine scored 1400 on the SAT—slightly above Notre Dame's overall average for admitted students but about 65 points below the average for unconnected students. “Perhaps what got me to stand out was the fact I was a legacy,” said Katherine, a management information systems major. “I don't think that's necessarily bad…. Most legacies wonder why they got in. If I do poorly on a test, I think,? only got in because my parents went here.’”

  Yet Notre Dame turned away two of Sara's other grandchildren, Katherine's cousins Sara and Mark Rockwell. Both Sara and Mark were strong enough academically to be admitted to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a top engineering school where both are undergraduates. Mark, in particular, had better credentials than many a legacy in the Notre Dame student body—including a 31 ACT score and 1360 SAT score—and badly wanted to go there, having attended his first Fighting Irish football game at the age of two. He applied to Notre Dame early, was deferred to the regular admissions process, and then put on the waiting list, where he languished for weeks before being told there was no slot for him. His grandmother, Sara, said she's “brokenhearted” at the rebuff. Added Steven: “We were all shocked when Sara and Mark didn't get in. I thought both were overqualified to be here.”

  In all likelihood, Mark was turned down because he didn't qualify as a legacy. When his grandfather steered his mother, Elizabeth, away from Notre Dame, he also deprived her children of admissions preference there. Notre Dame gives a break only to alumni children—not grandchildren, nieces, or nephews. Otherwise, more than 60 percent of the student body would be composed of alumni relatives, which “would not be healthy,” Saracino said. “It would make Notre Dame an exclusive club.”

  The Rockwell family didn't attend the reunion. Elizabeth Abowd-Rockwell said in a phone interview that after Mark was deferred, she called admissions counselors to explain that he was descended from Notre Dame's most prolific paterfamilias. “It didn't matter to them,” she said. “Legacy stops at the parents, it doesn't go beyond that.” She said she had a “hard time with it” when Sara and Mark were rejected. “It did hurt when they didn't get in. I knew their cousin [Katherine] got in. In comparing her and Mark, they were similar.” The experience has soured her on legacy preference: “I think I would eliminate legacy preference and go with each individual applicant and look at the person as much as possible.”

  Mark is majoring in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and is building a solar-powered boat. He has an A-minus average and wants to design roller coasters as a career. He and Sara bought Carnegie Mellon clothing for their uncle, Peter, who has a Carnegie Mellon graduate degree but more often wears Notre Dame garb.

  Mark said he's enjoying Carnegie Mellon and likes Pittsburgh better than South Bend. “Even if I had gotten into Notre Dame, Carnegie Mellon would have been the better choice,” he said. But the sting lingers. He and Katherine “were the same caliber student academically,” he said. “We lined up everywhere. She's a business major, not as mathy as I was. She made up in social sciences and humanities what I have in math. She scored higher on the SAT, but overall we're about the same.

  “I realized legacy was a problem when my sister didn't get in. They didn't consider me a legacy because my mother and father didn't go there. Still, if they're looking for genetics, the genes are obviously there.

  “I was really bummed. Everyone's gone there. But I didn't want to get in because all these alumni were my uncles. Someone should get in for who they are, not who their parents are.”

  ON EITHER SIDE of the entryway to the Hessert Laboratory for Aerospace Research, a plaque and a framed poster pay homage to donor Thomas Hessert, a 1948 Notre Dame alumnus, former recipient of the university's Man of the Year Award, founder of a New Jersey construction firm, and “lifelong aeronautics enthusiast.” But the university's biggest tribute to Hessert can be reckoned in a bit of folk wisdom that makes the rounds of Haddonfield, New Jersey, Memorial High School at college application time: if a Hessert is your classmate, don't expect to get into Notre Dame.

  This local lore is rooted in bitter experience. For two straight years, Notre Dame spurned a high-ranking Haddonfield applicant and admitted one of Thomas Hessert's grandsons with lower grades but greater pull. The Hesserts” admissions success suggests that, to paraphrase George Orwell's dictum in Animal Farm, all legacies are equal, but some are more equal than others; those from wealthy families with a history of philanthropy to the university get a bigger admissions break.

  At Notre Dame, assistant provost Saracino said, there's a strong “overlap” between legacies and development cases. Of the 5 percent of Notre Dame students given extra consideration for fund-raising reasons, three in five are alumni children.

  Like the Hesserts, Michelle Lombardi appears to be an example of this double boost. Her father, Patrick J. Lombardi, a Notre Dame graduate and telecommunications executive, and his brother Paul endowed a scholarship at Notre Dame. In the fall of 2001, during Michelle's senior year in high school, her father arranged for her to meet William Sexton, then the university's head of fund-raising. Despite an ACT score of 28 out of 36— equivalent to an SAT score between 1240 and 1270, well below the Notre Dame average—she was admitted. Michelle said she often wonders whether her legacy status and the session with Sexton facilitated her acceptance. “That's always a question in the back of my head,” she said. “If my dad hadn't gone here, would I have gotten in? I guess I'll never know.”

  Thomas Hessert's son William, also a Notre Dame graduate, has six sons of his own. The first four—William, Walter, Thomas, and Patrick— have all enrolled at Notre Dame. In 2002, Notre Dame chose Walter Hessert over Haddonfield salutatorian Kathleen D'Agati. Besides ranking second in the class with a grade point average of 98.96 out of 100, Kathleen was president of the student council, captain of the track team, and a member of the homecoming court; her community service included traveling to Mexico to build a public school kitchen and install water fountains in a park. The daughter of a mechanical engineer and a preschool teacher, she also found time to give her friend Walter Hessert a hand with his homework.

  “Basically, I helped him get through school,” she said. “He's so smart, but he's not the hardest worker. It was always like, ‘Kathleen, did you do the questions?’”

  They had something else in common—their college of choice. Walter wanted to go to Notre Dame because his older brother was there, Kathleen because of its academic prestige and school spirit, and both applied early. Since 83 percent of Notre Dame freshmen rank in the top tenth of their high school class, Kathleen's better grades seemed to give her the edge. She first sensed what she was up against at a briefing given at the high school for prospective students by a Notre Dame admissions representative, who turned out to be a friend of Walter's brother.

  “It was definitely an element of the good old boys,” Kathleen said. “Walter was like, ‘Do you know so-and-so?” They really bonded.”

  Kathleen was deferred to the regular pool and then turned down, which she felt as such a devastating blow that she mentioned it in her baccalaureate address at Haddonfield's graduation ceremonies. “A few months ago, I was rejected from the college that I really wanted to go to,” she told the assembled throng. “It was difficult for me because I had worked so hard to get in and they essentially told me I wasn't ‘good enough.” I was upset, but I knew in my heart that I was ‘good enough.””

  Kathleen settled instead for Clemson University, where as of March 2006 she was a senior with a 3.85 grade point average, expecting to graduate with honors in May. Walter, who was placed on the waiting list by less selective Fairfield and Bucknell universities, majored in political science and Spanish at Notre Dame. He also became friendly with top administrators and trustees, who succumbed to his gregarious charm—and, perhaps, his surname. As we lunched together at the Morris Inn on campus in the fall of 2004, a waitress interrupted us to say that two diners at a nearby table wanted to buy us dessert: former university executive vice president Timothy Scully and former Coca-Cola Corp. chief operating officer Donald Keough, an ex-chairman of Notre Dame's board of trustees. Walter waved to them and called to Father Scully, “Thanks, padre.”

  Over lunch Walter defended his Notre Dame credentials. Despite his B average in high school, he said, he had a much better SAT score (1470, including an 800 in math) than Kathleen D'Agati (1290). He was also an accomplished wrestler, recruited by Duke University and Davidson College. Notre Dame does not have a wrestling team. “Kathleen certainly was a very good student,” he said. “As a friend, I felt awful she didn't get in. We were different types of applicants. Do I know if I would have gotten in if there was no legacy? I truly don't know. I was a strong applicant too.”

  The year after Walter graduated from Haddonfield High, Notre Dame's recruiter there again recognized one name among the prospective applicants. “You're a Hessert,” he exclaimed to Walter's younger brother Thomas. Whereupon another hopeful, worried that the fix was in, asked if Notre Dame would only take one Haddonfield student a year. The representative denied it, but that's how it played out, much to Claire Campbell's dismay. She ranked third in her Haddonfield class, scored 1340 on her SATs, and played two sports. She applied to nine colleges, including Cornell in the Ivy League. All admitted her—except Notre Dame, which opted for Walter's younger brother Thomas.

  Neither Thomas's grades nor his SAT score (1280) matched Claire's. “I'm sure legacy played a role,” said Thomas, who made the dean's list at Notre Dame and became president of the student entrepreneur club. “I could have done worse than I did and still got in.”

  “If there's a building on campus that has your name on it, that's a good sign,” said Jeffrey Holman, a Haddonfield High guidance counselor.

  Thomas and Walter's father, William Hessert, who owns his own construction company, defended legacy preference on the grounds that it fosters “social cohesion,” binding together children with long family histories of attending Notre Dame. He added: “I have no question that each one of my sons can match themselves at least equally with any member of the university. If being a legacy makes Notre Dame look at the application twice instead of once, I think it's a justifiable advantage.”

  Claire Campbell enrolled at Rice University in Houston. In March 2006, she was a junior majoring in biochemistry with a 3.68 grade point average and regularly spending time with an intellectually disabled woman through a university-sponsored buddy program. “Rice is definitely a better fit,” she said. “Notre Dame is missing out on a lot of good students. If they're not accepting the better people, the whole school in general will be affected by that.”

  Americans who watch college football and basketball on television see a lot of black faces and assume that most recruited athletes benefiting from lower admissions standards are minorities. That's a big misconception. Top universities also sponsor teams and give preference to athletes in a wide variety of patrician sports rarely played by minorities or low-income whites: squash, sailing, skiing, crew, water polo, fencing, equestrian events, and the like. Since few inner-city or rural public schools can afford the facilities, equipment, travel, and coaches” salaries, and few low-income parents are familiar with the fine points of these pastimes, only children from wealthy homes or attending suburban and private high schools are exposed to them. If these students show promise, their parents—fully aware of the potential return in college admissions— underwrite private lessons, club memberships, boats, horses, ergometers (machines that simulate rowing), or other expenses. This advantage for the rich raises the question of whether proficiency in squash or sailing or horseback riding should be considered a credential for a college education or just a token of social status.

  Despite coming from prosperous families and solid high schools, Catelyn Coyle and Andria Haneman each scored well below the University of Virginia's 1370 average on the SATs for out-of-state students. But Kevin Sauer was impressed by their results on a different test—the ERGs. Sauer, who coaches women's crew at Virginia, seeks prospects who can row 2,000 meters on the ergometer in seven and a half minutes or less. Because Catelyn and Andria met that standard, he offered them admissions slots set aside by the university for his recruits, and athletic scholarships to offset part of Virginia's $28,850-a-year out-of-state tuition, fees, and room and board.

  Now, on the brisk Saturday morning of April 16, 2005, Catelyn and Andria faced another test. Virginia is usually one of the nation's best crew teams, but its top varsity boat had been performing below expectations. Tinkering with the lineup after a disappointing loss a week earlier to the University of California, Coach Sauer had elevated Catelyn and Andria to the first varsity eight for a contest against Oregon State University. It was being held on the Rivanna Reservoir, five miles from the UVA campus in Charlottesville. From the dock below the boathouse, teammates serenaded Catelyn, Andria, and the rest of the varsity eight with the traditional “Wahoo Wa” cheer as they lifted the shell over their heads, laid it in the water, and headed to the starting line.