Of Schwab's eight children, the three oldest, all Ithaca High graduates, have enrolled at Cornell under his prodding. Free tuition “puts a lot of pressure on the family,” he said. “Cornell is such a fine school. You'd better have a darn good reason for going somewhere else beyond just, ‘Dad, I'm sick of being here in Ithaca and want to leave town.””

  Schwab's first child, a son, did want to leave Ithaca. Using Cornell as his safety school, he applied to four other elite universities—and was rejected or wait-listed at all of them. “He had the most difficult time adjusting to the fact he was going to his hometown school,” the dean said. “He wishes he had applied more widely, even though we would have strongly pressured him to go to Cornell anyway. The hometown kids—I joke if they lived fifty miles away, they'd be really excited to get into an Ivy League school like Cornell. They know the faculty as their friends” parents; there's a little less luster to the place.”

  The lesson Schwab drew from his son's disappointment was not to let his other children go wherever they wanted but rather to dispel any illusions of escaping home by pushing them to apply to Cornell under binding early decision. His third child, a daughter, took that advice. “Everyone in every walk of life wonders about paths not taken,” he said. “But she was eager enough to go to Cornell, and certainly acquiesced.” With her younger siblings, he added, “We're really pushing Cornell.”

  IN ANALYSES of college admissions, preferences for children of alumni and faculty are sometimes paired. The New York Times, for instance, described faculty children as “the other legacies” in a January 2005 headline. Both preferences do involve universities taking care of their own, but there's an important distinction between them. Legacy preference is a fund-raising tool; its primary purpose is to separate alumni from their bankrolls. But the admissions edge for faculty children loses money, at least on the surface, because it's tied to a tuition benefit. Each faculty child that enrolls for free replaces a potentially full-paying customer. The cost to universities is considerable—$9 million a year at Boston University, for example.

  Why do universities maintain such an expensive tuition and admission package? One explanation is historical: tuition benefits for faculty children date back to an era when college education was cheaper and admissions were less competitive than they are today. Already available at some universities in the nineteenth century, discounted tuition for faculty children became widespread during the Great Depression, when colleges couldn't afford a decent wage for professors but had plenty of empty seats in their classrooms.

  Later, fully portable plans that allowed faculty children to go anywhere at reduced cost became commonplace. Tuition exchange consortia sprung up, in which liberal arts colleges traded slots, admitting each other's employee dependents for free. But in recent years the soaring cost of tuition has prompted some universities to curb tuition subsidies for faculty children going to other schools. According to a 2004 survey of 354 schools by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources in Knoxville, Tennessee, 58.1 percent pay full tuition for employee children attending their own institution, while only 19 percent pay it elsewhere. Another 23.5 percent of the institutions surveyed pay at least half of tuition at their own institution, versus another 9.5 percent that do so elsewhere. This tuition differential has increased pressure on universities to admit their own faculty children.

  Also, while expensive for universities, discounted tuition for faculty children is still cheaper than one possible alternative—raising salaries so faculty could more easily afford their children's college tuition. Such a salary hike would likely have to be across the board, as it would be politically impossible to increase salaries only for professors with college-age children. Since a tuition waiver, on the other hand, is targeted to those professors, it indirectly enables universities to maintain lower salaries for other faculty members who don't have children or whose children are already adults.

  In addition, at most universities, professors qualifying for the benefit don't have to pay taxes on the tuition money they save. Under federal law, the perk is tax-free as long as it is also provided to low-paid employees such as custodians. The tax-free status means that the U.S. taxpayer shares the burden with the university of paying the faculty child's tuition.

  Since there is no obvious reason why U.S. taxpayers should subsidize college tuitions of faculty children, the Internal Revenue Service has repeatedly proposed taxing the benefit. Each time, the well-organized higher education lobby has fended off the attack. Cornell's Schwab recalled writ-ing to his senators and congressmen to defend the tax-free status: “I managed to dream up all kinds of high-flown justifications for it,” he joked.

  The issue reemerged in January 2005, when Congress's joint taxation committee recommended doing away with tax-free tuition benefits for faculty and staff children, which it estimated would reap $1.9 billion over 10 years. The committee report described the tax exclusion as raising “fairness concerns” because “it is not available to individuals working in fields other than education and, within the education field, may be available primarily to those working for educational institutions which have the greatest resources.”

  “This will be the fourth time I've fought the repeal,” sighed Sheldon Steinbach, vice president and general counsel of the American Council on Education. “This baby just will not go away…. We've been able to defend it as a very traditional faculty fringe benefit. It's been around for a very long time. People have made career decisions based on it. To upset it midstream would be grossly inequitable.” As on the previous occasions, the committee's proposal failed to gain traction.

  A generous tuition and admissions package for faculty children also helps universities hang on to—and recruit—star professors, reducing the financial and prestige hits of unwanted turnover. “Every time I think about leaving Notre Dame, I think about that tuition benefit, and how many of my kids haven't gone through here yet,” said Cavadini. “I practically signed my life away.” The tuition benefit, the theology chairman added, is a “great selling point for recruitment. I use this to recruit people all the time,” such as Gary Anderson, a tenured Harvard professor who joined Notre Dame's faculty in 2003. Anderson's son, then entering his senior year in high school, wanted to go to a Catholic university, and his first choice was Notre Dame. Although Notre Dame faculty members generally become eligible for the tuition benefit after three years of service, Anderson negotiated a one-year vesting period so his son would qualify for free tuition as a freshman. The youth subsequently was admitted and enrolled at Notre Dame.

  Without the faculty child edge, Anderson said, “it's hard to know” whether his son would have been accepted. “Notre Dame is extraordinarily competitive. If you looked at his scores, he was right in the thick of things.” While his son's free education at a top 25 university was a “nice benefit,” Anderson added, he moved chiefly because he's grown weary of secular ac-ademia and believes in Notre Dame's “overall ethos and goal.” He's there “for the long haul,” he said, not just until his son graduates.

  A HIGHLY competitive school with growing prestige, Tufts University has attracted more and better applicants in recent years. In 2005, candidates for Tufts averaged 1344 out of 1600 on the SAT, up from 1313 in 2001. Tufts, which admits one out of every four applicants, has raised its bar accordingly, with accepted students averaging 1410 in 2004, up from 1360 in 2001.

  Tufts professors are delighted with the improvement in the student body—except when it doesn't leave room for their own children. Because Tufts pays full tuition for faculty and staff children enrolled there, and nothing elsewhere, its rejections of several underqualified faculty children have prompted grumbling by professors forced to pony up tuition at other universities. Professors who profit from Tufts” increasing selectivity every day in their own classrooms nevertheless argue that faculty children should be exempt from the higher standards.

  “We shouldn't allow this benefit to float higher or lower depending on what the demand is in a particular year of getting into Tufts,” said Sheldon Krimsky, president of the Tufts chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “It should be based upon principles, such as ‘Has this faculty child met the minimum requirements?” ‘Can the faculty child do the work?” ‘Will they succeed at the university?” Rather than, based on the whims of demand, ‘Will there be enough space for them this year?””

  To save money and boost student quality, most selective universities have sought at one time or another to trim either the tuition subsidy or the number of faculty child admits. But distinguished academics protest any rollback of this cherished perk with the ferocity of professional athletes fighting a salary cap. Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, have scaled back proposed cuts in tuition benefits rather than antagonize faculty. (A Stanford spokeswoman said the benefit was retained for its value as a recruiting tool. She added that Stanford has conducted workshops on applying to college for faculty and staff, and that being a faculty or staff child “can be a plus factor.”)

  Daniel Saracino, Notre Dame's assistant provost for admissions, said few professors respond meekly to his warnings that their children don't measure up academically and might not be admitted. Typically, he said, the faculty member will complain that Notre Dame admits football players with worse grades and test scores than his child. Who's more important to the university, the football team or the faculty? a disgruntled faculty member might ask.

  At Tufts, where the average full professor was paid $109,000 in 2004-5, favored treatment for faculty children has been a long-standing source of contention. About one hundred undergraduates, or 2 percent of the student body, are offspring of faculty and staff. Tufts used to provide free tuition for faculty children but had a less generous plan for staff dependents. But the university began reexamining that policy after a 1984 federal law specified that only tuition benefits provided to both highly paid and low-salaried employees would be considered tax-free. In 1991, Tufts capped the benefit for faculty children at its current level of tuition, then $16,750.

  The faculty reaction was fearsome: 90 percent signed a petition protesting the cap. “We got more response than we've ever gotten from faculty in terms of signatures.” Professor Krimsky said. The Tufts administration backed down in 1992, not only restoring free tuition for faculty children but extending it to staff children as well to preserve the tax-free benefit. “As a practical matter, these benefits are very difficult to change,” observed Laurence Bacow, Tufts president since 2001. “Expectations have been created among the faculty.”

  One of the administrators who crafted the cap, Steven Manos, later benefited from its demise. Although Manos, Tufts” executive vice president for finance, was paid $294,210 in salary in 2002-3, plus $83,767 in contributions to employee benefit plans and $6,064 in expenses, his son Alan qualified for free tuition when he enrolled at Tufts in 2003. Both Manoses declined comment.

  Having preserved the tuition benefit, faculty members assumed Tufts” admissions office would go along by accepting their children. But that premise, solid in the 1990s, became shaky in the next decade under Bacow and a new admissions dean who had big ambitions for Tufts. While the administration still gave an edge to faculty children, it didn't want the gap between them and other students to widen. As admissions standards soared overall, faculty children needed to improve too.

  Driving home this lesson, Tufts rejected the daughter of history professor Gary Leupp in 2004. “It was a very unpleasant surprise,” said Leupp. “We have very few perks. The faculty think, ‘At least my kid will go to this school.” I assumed, as did several of my colleagues, that our kids would get in. When they didn't get in, we felt irked. We don't make that much money; how are we going to pay for our children's college?”

  Leupp told me that his daughter would have been a stronger candidate for Tufts had he been able to afford private schooling or SAT coaching. “If a kid's parents aren't wealthy and are obliged to put their kid through a local public school where the teachers might not even be competent, and whose As, B's, and C's don't necessarily mean a whole lot,” then her grades aren't a reflection of her intelligence, he said.

  “It looks good for a university to boast that its admitted freshman class has an ever higher SAT cutoff,” Leupp added. “Paradoxically, the better a reputation a university gets (which is primarily a result of the work of the faculty), the higher this very dubious bar gets placed, and the more difficult it becomes for institutions to respect their implied commitment to provide admission to faculty kids. That's really frustrating to the faculty parent.”

  At a Tufts faculty meeting in February 2005, a colleague of Leupp in the history department asked university president Laurence Bacow to clarify the policy on faculty child admissions. President Bacow replied that while Tufts was committed to preference for faculty children, admissions standards were rising for all applicants. “It's gotten more competitive for everyone, not just the faculty kid,” President Bacow told me. “The faculty kid who would have gotten in five or ten years ago now has a lower probability.”

  Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts, told me that the university admits faculty children at similar rates to other preferred groups, including athletes, legacies, and Medford residents. “What we're saying to the faculty is that in this applicant pool, which is increasingly national and international and powerful, we'll give your children a special look,” he said. “We're not guaranteeing all faculty children a place in the freshman class. I think there's some sense among the faculty that this is what they expect. All things being equal, or a little less than equal, we can” admit a faculty child, he continued. “But we only have so many slots. At some point you have to ask the question, ‘Who's not getting in?””

  Coffin answered his own question at the next faculty meeting, where he gave a presentation entitled “The Case for Need-Blind Admissions at Tufts.” Unlike most premier universities, including those in the Ivy League, Tufts is “need-sensitive” rather than “need-blind” in admissions jargon; in other words, it factors an applicant's financial status into its admissions decisions. Thus, even as Tufts subsidizes faculty children with marginal credentials, it spurns top-notch candidates whose only flaw is their low income.

  In 2004, Coffin moved 193 low-income candidates, who would have required an average of more than $25,000 a year in grants, from Tufts” pool of admitted students into its rejected pile to avoid exceeding the university's $7.8 million aid budget for freshmen. “In a need-blind universe, we would have taken them all, and you would be teaching them,” Coffin told the faculty. The about-face, Coffin added, “made me sick.” The last-minute discarding of the 193 applicants made the Tufts student body wealthier, whiter, and academically weaker than it would have been otherwise, Coffin said. Despite growing up in poverty, 52 percent of students jettisoned for financial reasons ranked in the top tenth of their high school classes, and nearly half surpassed Tufts” median SAT scores.

  Although whites make up more than three-quarters of the Tufts student body, they constituted only 52 percent of the 193 students turned away. Instead, a disproportionate number of those cast aside—24 percent—were Asian American. (The Tufts student body is 14 percent Asian American.) While he had sought to preserve racial diversity, Coffin ex-plained to the faculty, relatively few white applicants came from low-income families, while affirmative action for underrepresented groups protected blacks and Hispanics, leaving disadvantaged Asians vulnerable, including immigrants and first-generation college students. President Bacow said in March 2006 that Tufts” “top priority” in its next capital campaign is rasing $200 million for financial aid to enable the university to admit students regardless of their ability to pay.

  Leupp's daughter, meanwhile, still ended up at Tufts. After she was turned down, Leupp complained to his two deans, saying he would find it hard to “go about my work with my wonted energy and enthusiasm.” A dean then made inquiries and suggested that the professor's daughter, who had enrolled at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, reapply as a transfer student. She was accepted and enrolled at Tufts for her sophomore year in the fall of 2005.

  PETER CAVADINI still thinks some Notre Dame students are stuck-up, but he doesn't regret going there. After some initial trepidation, he realized in a freshman literature seminar that he could hold his own with classmates. Although a late switch of majors from philosophy to anthropology postponed his graduation until the spring of 2006, he compiled a respectable 3.2 grade point average, took a catechism course from his father, and, most important, found a calling. Substituting for his father (sidelined by eye surgery) at a conference in Nigeria, he encountered firsthand the poverty and disease afflicting Africa and hopes to return there after Notre Dame and teach high school.

  Peter made up his mind on another question too: admissions breaks for faculty children such as himself. “Although I'm really glad I came here, I believe the preference for faculty children is unfair,” he said. “Some kid worked really hard in high school and got beat by a kid whose father happens to work there. That's wrong.”

  Henry Park and Stanley Park grew up on opposite coasts, but they had a lot in common: surnames, Korean American heritage, stellar test scores, and a misplaced faith that elite universities accept students on merit.

  Henry ranked 14th out of 79 members of the class of 1998 at the Groton School, a supercompetitive prep school in Groton, Massachusetts. He got a perfect 800 on the math SAT for a combined score of 1560 out of 1600, placing him in the top one-quarter of 1 percent of college-bound students across the nation. On the SAT II subject tests, he scored another perfect 800 on the harder of the two math exams offered, along with 760 out of 800 in Latin and 740 in physics. He played violin and competed on the cross-country team, and a respected math journal published a paper he coauthored with two classmates. And as the son of hardworking, middle-class Korean immigrants who dreamed of a better life for their children and scrimped to pay Groton's tuition, Henry seemed to embody the up-by-his-bootstraps American saga that is supposed to appeal to college admissions officers.