These estimates might be conservative. Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told me that he once calculated the proportion of admissions spaces open to “regular students” at one Ivy League university, which he declined to name. His startling conclusion: students without any nonacademic preference are vying for only 40 percent of the slots. Birgeneau added that Ivy League schools typically understate the number of students whose alumni ties facilitated their admissions. For instance, most Ivies don't count grandchildren as legacies, even though alumni often give the most money—and thus wield the greatest sway over admissions—after becoming grandparents.

  College administrators often defend the preferences of privilege by contending that the beneficiaries are “qualified” or “can do the work.” But in college admissions-speak, those descriptions only mean that a student is likely to graduate. The vast majority of applicants to top colleges fit (or exceed) those descriptions, but only a small proportion are admitted. Since more than 90 percent of students at elite universities graduate, being “qualified” means meeting minimum standards—a far cry from being the best candidate for the slot.

  Pressed further, these administrators say they need the preferences of privilege to keep up with their peers—to build laboratories and concert halls, fund faculty salaries and scholarships. If a college doesn't want to alienate well-heeled alumni and other parents whom it counts on as donors, the argument goes, it must admit their children as students, even if that means lowering standards. But there are many reasons to give to colleges, and whether and how much philanthropy would dwindle without an admissions quid pro quo is debatable. One of the country's best private universities, the California Institute of Technology, raises plenty of money without compromising admissions.

  ALBERT GORE JR., Harvard ‘69, was a member of his alma mater's board of overseers from 1987 until he became Bill Clinton's understudy in 1993. The board's official responsibility is to maintain academic standards, but members and ex-members enjoy a side benefit that undercuts that goal: the admissions office relaxes standards as needed for their children.

  From 1991 to 2001, all four of Gore's children enrolled at Harvard, defying the one-in-ten odds against admission. Asked about this success, a former Harvard official told me that the Gore children “floated up” for attention from the board of overseers. “Al's in the category of active alum,” the official said. “He wasn't really ever in the position to give Harvard much political help, except along with other senators if there was a bill supporting basic scientific research. But he contributed fairly substantially in terms of volunteer interest. He was an overseer and he was a very strong adviser to the environmental program.” A Gore spokesman declined comment.

  Vice President Gore's three daughters were excellent students whose Harvard acceptances raised few eyebrows. Their younger brother, who had recovered from a near-fatal car accident as a six-year-old, was a different story. His parents sent him to St. Albans, a preparatory school located on the grounds of the National Cathedral and patronized by blue-blood families like the Guggenheims and Rockefellers. St. Albans aims to instill both learning and manners—its lower-school headmaster greets students at the door every morning and critiques their handshakes with comments such as “Make it a little firmer”—and doesn't condone misbehavior. In 1996, it suspended eighth-grader Albert Gore III for smoking marijuana in a pastoral retreat called the Bishop's Garden during a school dance. Perturbed at the school's handling of the matter, the Gores transferred Albert to Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school and Chelsea Clinton's alma mater. In the summer before his senior year there, he was cited for driving nearly 100 miles per hour in a 55-mph zone.

  Like St. Albans and most other prep schools, Sidwell Friends does not formally rank students. Classmates and others familiar with Albert describe him as intelligent but not studious. “Sidwell is a very competitive place,” a classmate told me. “I wouldn't say he was one of the academic all-stars. He was obviously very bright, but it wasn't necessarily something people would have thought off the top of their head that he would go to Harvard. There were a few kids that really stood out, and he wasn't in that shining top ten.”

  Another Sidwell classmate said, “Al is a bright, bright person. In terms of work, some other students were putting out more work. A stu-dent may not have the best test scores or grades, but people talk about potential. I would hope that's what Harvard would see in a student like Al.”

  Unlike his sisters, who were all accepted to Princeton too, Albert did not seek admission there. He applied to Harvard in the fall of 2000, when his father was the Democratic candidate for president. Harvard officials may have sought assurances that he had outgrown his rule breaking. If so, that hope was misplaced.

  After enrolling at Harvard in 2001, he was ticketed in September 2002 near a military base for driving under the influence. Charged with marijuana possession in 2003, he settled that case by agreeing to substance abuse counseling. Aside from playing junior varsity football as a freshman, he kept a low profile on campus; when he graduated from Harvard in 2005, his name wasn't even listed in the commencement program.

  ELITE UNIVERSITIES “are skimming along in the upper atmosphere,” former Yale president Benno Schmidt told me recently. “They don't even know what's down below. Some in the elite universities want to help, and a few actually roll up their sleeves and try. But most have no idea how total is the disconnect between a place like Yale and the one-third or more of the high schools in the U.S. that serve mostly poor kids.”

  This disconnect underscores an inconvenient truth about U.S. higher education's oft-proclaimed goal of diversity. Of all the sorts of diversity that elite colleges profess to seek, socioeconomic diversity counts the least. To build a freshman class that is balanced in other respects, colleges routinely sacrifice the interests of low-income families. They achieve the gender diversity required by Title IX largely by recruiting affluent female athletes, racial diversity by admitting middle-class blacks and Hispanics, and international diversity by pursuing jet-setters from Europe and the Middle East.

  Opportunity is scarcer today for children of poverty than in living memory, and our higher education system is partly responsible. Even with recent tuition hikes, public institutions from state universities to community colleges still expand career opportunities for working-class students. But private universities are another story. Although they are tax-exempt, nonprofit institutions subsidized by our tax dollars and receive billions of dollars in government funding and research grants, they are shirking their mission to unearth and nurture diamonds in the rough. Instead, they help to enshrine an American aristocracy. Income and wage gaps between the top and bottom strata have widened in the past quarter century; social mobility, once a defining American characteristic, is becoming as rare as the street corner phone booth. The country is largely ruled by what I call the “legacy establishment”: President George W. Bush, the last two Democratic candidates for president, and four of the nine Supreme Court justices are either alumni children themselves or have legacy offspring, or both. Although polls show that most Americans oppose admissions breaks for alumni children, this establishment has repelled every populist challenge to the preferences that sustain it.

  “A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America,” The Economist reported in a special issue in January 2005. “Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace…. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society…. Everywhere you look in modern America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.”

  Not all of this inequality, of course, can be laid at the door of higher education. The rich enjoy many advantages in American society. They lead longer and healthier lives, enjoy more travel and cultural vistas than less prosperous families, and attend the best elementary and secondary schools. But such advantages provide all the more reason not to make exceptions for underqualified students from rich families.

  The fact is that the preferences of privilege enable wealthy candidates to nose out deserving working-class and middle-class students at elite colleges. The result is gross inequity: depending on the study, only 3 to 11 percent of students at America's most selective colleges come from families in the lowest income quartile. Asian American students, many of them immigrants and the first in their families to go to college, are disproportionately affected—rebuffed by what appears to be an informal quota system.

  The casualties aren't just individual students but America itself. To stifle talent and exalt mediocrity is to weaken the country's economic competitiveness and political leadership. Voters unhappy with their choices for president in 2004 could blame Yale University. Both President George W. Bush and Massachusetts senator John Kerry were Yale legacies from well-off families. Both were mediocre students. Both belonged to Yale's secret Skull and Bones society, forging contacts that helped them in later life. And both continued family tradition by sending a daughter to Yale. Who's to bet that Vanessa Kerry and Barbara Pierce Bush, or Harrison Frist and Albert Gore III, won't face off on an election ballot some years hence?

  RED-HAIRED, affable Harrison Frist attended St. Albans, where his father is on the governing board. St. Albans does not rank students but—unlike Sidwell Friends—maintains a chapter of the Cum Laude Society. According to a St. Albans spokesman, Harrison was not inducted into Cum Laude, signifying that he did not rank in the top fifth of his class. The Frist family declined comment.

  “I've always felt a lot of jealousy and anger,” said a St. Albans classmate who fell short of the Ivy League. “A lot of my classmates were getting into Harvard and Yale not because they had a 4.0 GPA or nailed the SAT but because their father had a connection with the dean of admission and had a famous last name. Harrison is a very nice guy, but he wasn't top 20 percent. He wasn't an intellectual. He was more of a jock type, a partyer on the weekends.”

  A high class rank is normally a prerequisite for Ivy League admission; more than 90 percent of freshmen at Princeton, for example, are in the top tenth of their high school classes. Indeed, when Harrison Frist applied to Princeton under its early decision program in the fall of 2001, admissions officers were taken aback: his grades and test scores fell far below university standards. On Princeton's 1 (best) to 5 (worst) academic scale for applicants, he was rated a 5. On its parallel nonacademic scale, he was a 3 or 4, signifying extracurricular leadership in his school but not talent of a state or national scope.

  Such applicants are almost always given a cursory look and rejected. Not Bill Frist's son. The senator, soon to be Republican leader, was already a Princeton alumnus, ex-trustee, and past recipient of a university award for championing science funding. Moreover, the senator's family—his father founded Hospital Corp. of America, the nation's largest owner of for-profit hospitals—had committed $25 million in 1997 to renovate a former physics building into the Frist Campus Center. Senator Frist, who opposes affirmative action for minorities in college admissions, apparently did not object to preferential treatment for his eldest son. No wonder that newly appointed Princeton president Shirley Tilghman advised her admissions staff that Harrison's acceptance was a high priority.

  Four other St. Albans seniors had sought early admission to Princeton, all with stronger records than Harrison. Perhaps worried that rejecting any of the quartet would prompt outcries of Frist favoritism, Princeton accepted them all. This cover-up strategy—admitting a subpar candidate for institutional reasons and then defusing potential criticism from parents, teachers, or guidance counselors by taking every other higher-ranking applicant from the same school—is well known in admissions circles and even has its own euphemism: considering “context.” More St. Albans graduates entered Princeton in 2002 than in the prior or subsequent years— and, since college admissions is a zero-sum game, fewer from other schools. One insider called it the “Frist effect.”

  Sherrie McKenna, director of college counseling at St. Albans from 2000 to 2005, said she was “as surprised as anyone” that Princeton took all five applicants but doubted that Harrison “carried” the others in with him. “I looked at that list and said, ‘How are they going to turn down any of these boys?” Two were very top students. Two were very good students and recruited athletes. Harrison was a legacy.”

  Princeton was Jamie Lee's first choice too. He lived by the slogan “Go big or go home.” To him it meant, as he wrote in his college application essay, “taking the biggest challenges, the biggest risks, not mindlessly or without calculation, but with confidence and with no other reward needed but success.”

  Not just Jamie's essay but his choices of where to send it exemplified this spirit. Disdaining his high school counselor's advice to include a safety school, he applied only to Princeton and six more of the country's most selective universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  He had reason to be cocky. Tall and dark-haired, with an English accent, a dry wit, and an air of regal reserve, Jamie was a superb student. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, he grew up in London, where teachers marveled at his ability and his IQ was measured at 162, widely considered genius level. When his family emigrated to Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2003, he quickly established himself as a top student at Greenwich High, a premier public school. On his first tries, without a test-prep course, he scored the maximum on the PSAT, the SAT, and two of his three SAT II subject tests; on the third SAT II, writing, he missed by only 20 points, scoring 780 out of 800.

  Nor was he merely a standardized-test machine; his problem solving displayed impressive originality. In 2005, Jamie won the Greenwich High award given to the senior who “demonstrates creative ability and inventiveness in math, who may take the unusual approach to a problem and come up with an unexpected answer.” His creativity also emerged in music (the high school string ensemble performed his composition “Three Dances,” with Jamie on cello) and mechanical design (he built an ingenious wooden cabinet with doors that automatically opened and closed a mobile rack for storing compact discs).

  “He likes to be oppositional and play the devil's advocate,” said his junior-year Latin teacher, Camille Fusco. “He's very independent in his thinking. On an essay question, he'd deliberately take the point of view I didn't want to hear. But he got away with it because he can take any view brilliantly.”

  He relished intellectual challenges. Before his multiple-choice final exam in advanced placement chemistry, the teacher offered an A-plus for the semester to anyone in the class who answered all sixty questions wrong— arguably as difficult as getting them all right, because it was impossible to know which choices were incorrect without knowing which were correct. The teacher made the same offer to his class every year, but no student had ever taken the risk and won. Jamie already had an A average in the class and would have aced the final the conventional way but couldn't resist a dare. Unfortunately, he carelessly answered one question right: his 1-out-of-60 final score lowered his semester mark to an A-minus.

  Nor did he get away with going big in college admissions. Coming from England, where universities such as Oxford and Cambridge no longer ask applicants whether their parents were alumni, Jamie failed to weigh the preferences of privilege. Unlike many classmates in the affluent suburb, he was not a legacy, recruited athlete, or development case. The Lees are comfortably off—Jamie's father is a consultant to money managers—but couldn't afford a major gift; they rent half of a duplex on the less ritzy side of town. In admissions parlance, Jamie was “unhooked.” And as Daniel Saracino, assistant provost for admissions at the University of Notre Dame, recently told me, so many spaces at elite universities are reserved for well-connected students that “the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water.”

  Through his mother, Jamie also belonged to a demographic group that colleges hold to a higher standard than any other: Asian Americans. Average SAT scores for Asian Americans admitted to the Ivy League are substantially above those for any other group, including whites; frustrated Asian applicants refer to any score below the maximum as an “Asian fail.” Jamie's strengths in math and music played into an ethnic stereotype. In the age of diversity, colleges turn away Asian American whizzes in calculus and music for fear of overloading their “symbiotic whole” with too many students of the same race and interests. “I understood there'd be a bit of discrimination against Asians,” Jamie told me.

  Whatever the reason, none of the seven elite universities accepted Jamie, stunning his teachers, friends, and family. “I was really shocked he didn't get in anywhere,” Fusco said. “I thought of him as a Harvard person.” His English literature teacher, Brigid Barry, said she was also “very, very surprised. There's no doubt he's an outstanding student.” She added that in eight years of teaching advanced placement English, she had seen the Ivy League schools admit many weaker candidates.

  I became aware of Jamie's predicament on May 22, 2005, when I received an email from his father, Tim Lee, with the subject line “Exceptionally Gifted High School Student Rejected by Every College.” It outlined his academic accomplishments and grim admissions news. Jamie had applied in the fall of 2004 to Princeton under an early decision program. Princeton, which had admitted Harrison Frist early, deferred Jamie until spring and then rejected him. Harvard, Stanford, and MIT rebuffed him too. Columbia and Dartmouth placed him on their waiting lists. But Columbia didn't pluck him from its list, and Dartmouth, which offered spots on its waiting list to 1,200 candidates, warned that it planned to admit very few of them.