Early admission programs at some schools do impose a financial burden on low-income students. These programs, known as early decision, require a candidate to apply early to only one school and enroll there if admitted. This restriction hurts students who need financial aid by preventing them from being admitted to multiple schools and comparing aid offers. But Harvard's early-action program had more flexible conditions. It let students apply to other schools and shop around for the best deal.

  The strongest evidence that preferences play a bigger part than timing in perpetuating inequality is that Harvard bends its standards to accommodate rich students not just at the beginning but also at the very end of the admissions season. While professing to discard early admissions in the interests of fairness, Harvard preserved the “Z-list” that ushers in well-connected applicants months after more outstanding classmates have been rejected. As we have seen, Z-listers are often admitted from the waiting list after their high school graduations and simply take a year off before enrolling at Harvard.

  Even as Harvard basked in its newfound reputation for social justice, Katrina Welch was sailing on a Caribbean schooner. She's the granddaughter of Harvard alumnus James O. Welch Jr., who endowed a Harvard professorship in computer science and is a member of the inner circle of its big-donor group, the Committee on University Resources. Her father, James O. Welch III, and his five brothers graduated from Harvard as well.

  At Pingry School, a New Jersey prep school, Katrina was popular with classmates and a solid student, but not an academic standout. She was not one of the twenty-four seniors in the Cum Laude Society, nor one of the twenty-nine Advanced Placement Scholars, nor one of the forty-two National Merit Scholarship Program Commended Scholars.

  Katrina registered to attend Boston University, but then the Z-list beckoned. After her fall 2006 voyage with Sea-mester, the expensive sail-ing program that fosters the leadership skills of wealthy teenagers, she spent the winter at a Telluride, Colorado, resort, teaching three-year-olds to ski. “In the spring I'll be in Spain playing tennis right outside of Barcelona,” she reported on her Facebook site, before “heading off to Harvard in the fall.” Katrina and her parents declined to comment.

  Her Pingry friend and classmate Jennifer Soo Hoo didn't head off to an elite college. Jennifer was a Cum Laude Society member, Advanced Placement Scholar, and National Merit Scholar, and an all-conference center back on the soccer team. She scored 34 out of 36 on the ACT, equivalent to 1500-1550 out of 1600 on the SAT. Nevertheless, Jennifer didn't get into any of the three Ivy League schools to which she applied: Brown, Dartmouth, and Pennsylvania. She's attending a preprofessional program in medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on a merit scholarship.

  Jennifer, who is of Chinese descent, says the Case program was her first choice all along, but adds that she “had no connections” in college admissions. “Going to a school like Pingry, that was a little tough. I was seeing so many other people getting in. College admissions is very political.”

  GUSHING THAT many admissions deans greeted Harvard's abolition of its early admissions program with “astonishment and delight,” the New York Times predicted in a front-page article that other colleges would follow suit. But as it turned out, few schools adopted even this minor step toward expanding access.

  As of March 2007, only Princeton and the University of Virginia had emulated Harvard. Other schools tacked in the opposite direction, adding a second round of early decision or an accelerated process called “instant decision.” Even Yale president Richard Levin, who in 2002 had called on premier colleges to drop early admissions as a group, now declined to take advantage of the opportunity.

  Elite colleges also clung tightly to the preferences of privilege. When a Wall Street Journal reporter asked Princeton president Shirley Tilghman in July 2006 whether alumni would still donate even if their children did not receive an admissions boost, she responded tartly, “We've never done the experiment.”

  This standpat attitude didn't endear academia to a growing cadre of critics in Congress and elsewhere. In December 2006,1 testified at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing on whether colleges are violating their nonprofit, tax-exempt status by behaving like for-profit businesses. Iowa senator Charles Grassley, then committee chairman and now its ranking Republican, said he would ask the Internal Revenue Service to consider taxing donations intended to secure college admissions.

  Senator Grassley bemoaned “the significant number of enrollment spaces at our nation's elite colleges that are reserved for the children of alumni, the children of teachers, and the children of multimillionaires whom the university hopes might give money down the road. All this means fewer spaces for the children of working families … We need to think whether these reserved spaces at our top colleges [represent] a public policy that should be subsidized by the tax code.”

  The next month, another Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee mounted the strongest bid yet to eliminate a cherished academic perk: the tax break for faculty children. College professors and staff members need not report as income the money they save when the college that employs them waives or reduces tuition for their children. The higher education lobby has for years fended off efforts to repeal the tuition benefit, which ramps up pressure on admissions officials to admit offspring of powerful administrators and faculty. This time, Arizona senator Jon Kyi proposed funding incentives for small businesses by scrapping the faculty-child benefit, which would save as much as $3 billion over ten years.

  His proposal prompted a vigorous debate and sent higher education lobbyists scrambling for support. “I don't question whether a university or a prep school wants to provide free tuition as an employment perk for a professor or chancellor,” Senator Kyi said. “But it makes little sense that the rest of the taxpayers in this country have to subsidize that free tuition.”

  “This amendment takes away a tax break for that person who has been working eight, ten, fifteen years at an institution, knowing that his or her child, who may be a junior or a sophomore in college, is there to get a good education,” responded Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who chairs Senate Finance. “It cuts people off mid-stream.”

  Senator Kyi's amendment lost, 50-42. Still, the tax break had reached a vote on the Senate floor for the first time, and seemed likely to resurface soon.

  ALSO HEATING up were protests against the higher admissions threshold for Asian American applicants. In October 2006, federal civil rights officials agreed to investigate a complaint by a Chinese immigrant that Princeton rejected him because of his race and national origin. Princeton and four other schools—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Penn—turned down Jian Li. As a high school senior in Livingston, New Jersey, he scored the maximum 2400 on the new SAT, one of only 238 students in the country to achieve a perfect score that year, and ranked in the top 1 percent of his class. He asked the federal government to suspend financial assistance to Princeton until the university eliminates preferences for predominantly non-Asian groups—legacies, athletes, and underrepresented minorities. Jian, who enrolled at Yale, told me that he wanted to “send a message” to Princeton “to be more cognizant of possible bias” and realize “that the way they're conducting admissions is not really equitable.”

  Officials at Princeton, where Asian Americans comprise 13 percent of the student body, responded that they did not discriminate against Jian because they turn down half of all applicants with perfect SATs. But they refused to make public a vital piece of information—how many of those spurned with 2400 scores are Asian American. If federal officials find that Princeton is more likely to reject Asians with perfect test scores than whites or minorities, the university may be forced to change its admissions policies. As of March 2007, the investigation is ongoing.

  Initially, most Ivy League sentiment ran against Jian. Princeton undergraduates resented the shadow his allegations cast over their college acceptances, while fellow Yalies felt he'd ended up at a better school anyway. Then, in January, a nasty parody in Princeton's student newspaper stereotyped Jian and other Asian Americans. “I the super smart Asian,” it read in part. “Princeton the super dumb college, not accept me … Yellow people make the world go round.” The column sparked a firestorm. Two Brown University sophomores, Neil Vangala and Jason Carr, launched an organization advocating equal treatment for Asians in admissions, and about one thousand people signed online petitions urging Princeton to release data on test scores and admission rates of applicants by ethnicity.

  “My daughter got perfect scores for her SAT and three SAT II but she was rejected by some prestige universities,” wrote one signer, Yong Lu of Columbia, South Carolina. “We never get an explanation. Only Asian students will face this kind of unfair treatment.”

  Asian American applicants to elite state universities also stood to benefit from voter attacks on admissions preferences for other groups. In Michigan, where the flagship university barely survived a legal challenge to affirmative action in 2003, voters in November 2006 struck down admissions preferences for African Americans and Hispanics. Affirmative action opponents behind that measure plan to place it on the ballot in November 2008 in other states; some of those against affirmative action say they want to abolish legacy preference too.

  During the Michigan campaign, a group opposing affirmative action released a study bolstering claims of discrimination against Asian students. The study, by the Center for Equal Opportunity in Virginia, found that Asian applicants admitted to the University of Michigan in 2005 had a median SAT score of 1400 on the 400-1600 scale then in use. That was 50 points higher than the median score of white students who were accepted, 140 points higher than that of Hispanics, and 240 points higher than that of blacks. Among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10 percent of Asian Americans, 14 percent of whites, 88 percent of Hispanics, and 92 percent of blacks. Asian applicants to the university's medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group.

  Julie Peterson, University of Michigan spokeswoman, said the study was flawed because many applicants take the ACT test instead of the SAT, and standardized test scores are only one of various tools used to evaluate candidates. “I utterly reject the conclusion” that the university discriminates against Asian Americans, she said. Asian Americans constitute 12.6 percent of the university's undergraduates.

  Like Ms. Peterson, some readers of this book argued that discrimination against Asian American applicants is a myth based on SAT scores, and that Asian students fall short on other criteria used in college admissions. However, while SATs are flawed predictors of future performance, and possibly biased, evidence is mounting of a higher bar for Asian students across a range of admissions factors. Princeton researcher Thomas Espenshade, who previously documented that Asians need to score 50 points higher than whites on the SATs to stand the same chance of admission to an elite college, told me recently that he has now compared white and Asian applicants” SAT scores, class ranks, grade point averages, and number of Advanced Placement exams taken. “We're finding that there's consistently this Asian penalty,” he said. He added that the Asian penalty persists even after preferences for alumni children and recruited athletes are taken into account— contrary to the claims of Harvard and other elite colleges that, because legacies and athletes are more likely to be white, the edges for those groups explain the disparity in credentials between successful white and Asian candidates.

  Top Asian American students are underrepresented in elite private colleges by yet another measure—academic honors and awards. Based on my own recent research, Asians comprise about 30 percent of winners and finalists for the most prestigious accolades given to high school seniors, about double their Ivy League enrollment. For example, of 8,091 students designated as AP National Scholars in 2006 for scoring 4 or higher on at least eight Advanced Placement exams, 2,602, or 32 percent, were Asian American.

  Of 141 Presidential Scholars honored by the federal government in 2006 as the country's top graduating seniors based on test scores, academic achievement, personal characteristics, leadership, and service activities, 38, or 27 percent, were Asian American. Asian Americans also make up between 30 and 40 percent of semifinalists and finalists for the Intel Science Talent Search, sometimes called the “junior Nobel Prize.” Nevertheless, Asian Americans are only about 15 percent of Ivy League undergraduates.

  ONE SUBSET of Asian American applicants encounters few barriers—the children of big donors. On Harvard's 2006 Z-list, joining Katrina Welch, was May Lan Dong, daughter of hedge fund manager and COUR member Mitchell Dong. May Lan, whose parents endowed a professorship at the Harvard School of Public Health, didn't make Cum Laude Society at her prep school, Buckingham Browne and Nichols in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her mother, Robin Dong, said May Lan, who has traveled overseas during her gap year, is “going to be fine academically at Harvard.”

  MONEY, OF course, doesn't just talk in college admissions; it also smooths career paths. In July 2006, twenty-five-year-old Jared Kushner, a Harvard graduate and New York University law student, paid a reported $10 million to acquire the weekly New York Observer, known for its upscale readership and provocative coverage of media, politics, and real estate. His father, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, who had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard shortly before it admitted his son, was living in a halfway house at the time after pleading guilty to tax violations, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering.

  Jared told reporters that he bought the Observer with his earnings from Massachusetts real estate investments to which relatives had staked him. He also said that his siblings, including younger brother Joshua, owned minority stakes in the Observer. Joshua, a Harvard undergraduate, became executive editor of a fledgling magazine about Harvard's fashion scene.

  Albert Gore III also went into publishing. After graduating from Harvard, he became associate publisher of GOOD Magazine, a new publication promoting social justice and environmental activism. On July 4, 2007, he was stopped for driving a fuel-efficient Toyota Prius hybrid more than 100 mph on a California highway and arrested on suspicion of possessing marijuana and prescription drugs.

  While Albert's father made an Oscar-winning documentary and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and rumored to be weighing another presidential candidacy, Harrison Frist's father left the limelight. Former majority leader Bill Frist retired from the Senate and disavowed a presidential run. His two younger sons did draw some attention for online postings. A photo depicted Vanderbilt student Jonathan Frist wearing six beers on his belt and what appeared to be Confederate cavalry pants. Princeton freshman Bryan Frist proclaimed, “I was born an American by God's Amazing Grace. Let's bomb some people.”

  Pierce Bush, the president's nephew, who had been admitted to Georgetown University despite academic struggles in secondary school, transferred after three semesters at the Washington, D.C., school to the University of Texas at Austin. Although he explained that he was leaving Georgetown because he was “burnt out by politics,” he wrote a letter to a Texas newspaper defending his uncle's policies.

  Chris Ovitz, who briefly attended Brown after his application there spurred a behind-the-scenes debate over how far to lower standards for a Hollywood celebrity, became director of business development for an Internet startup. His father, Michael Ovitz, whose $140 million severance package from Walt Disney Co. had antagonized shareholders, again faced unflattering headlines—this time for having hired private detective Anthony Pellicano, who was indicted in 2006 on wiretapping and conspiracy charges.

  Jamie Lee, whose desire to “go big” in college admissions almost backfired despite a perfect SAT score, is majoring in math at Dartmouth, and also serves as academic chair of his fraternity. MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones, who described a Korean American student as a “textureless math grind,” resigned in April 2007, after the university found that she had misrepresented her academic degrees. Ty Grisham, the University of Virginia backup outfielder who rarely got the chance to play in the stadium his father helped build, now attends another school with paternal ties. He's a legacy at University of Mississippi law school, where John Grisham earned a degree in 1981. The novelist was named Virginia's 2007 Commencement speaker, perhaps a sign that his concerns over its baseball coaches” motives in recruiting his son have been put to rest. Duke benchwarmer Joe Pagliuca, son of seven-figure donor and Boston Celtics part owner Stephen Pagliuca, finished his college basketball career without scoring a point.

  Joel Fleishman, the Duke law professor who helped get Ralph Lauren's children into Duke and then joined the Polo Ralph Lauren Inc. board, wrote a book in which he hailed the “generosity and creativity” of America's plutocrats and defended admissions giveaways for their children. In The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth Is Changing the World (2007), Fleishman noted that “some critics” advocate “dismantling or diminishing the tax benefits enjoyed by America's better-off individuals” who donate in order to gain “admissions preferences at Ivy League colleges.” Fleishman dismissed these concerns, arguing that cultural institutions can only sustain themselves financially by catering to the rich. “I think the critics are missing the point,” he wrote. Do donors motivated by “self-interest or the quest for social prestige ever play a role? Sometimes they do. But what does that matter, if our shared culture benefits?”

  EVEN AS a child, I was aware of the Ivy League's exalted status. Before settling down to his occasional afternoon nap, my father, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, would joke, “If Harvard calls, wake me up.”