Fitzsimmons dismissed such comments as irrelevant: “You don't admit or not admit somebody because their older brother was a terrific person.” However, Lloyd Peterson, a former Yale admissions officer who now counsels applicants as vice president for education at College Coach Inc., said elite universities should be concerned about conflicts of interest. “It's difficult to sit in a room with a bunch of admissions officers at a place like Yale or Harvard and have 15,000 kids come across your desk and you not know any of them,” he said. “There's a level of clubbiness that goes on behind closed doors.”

  Unlike Harvard's undergraduate admissions, its law school does have a conflict-of-interest policy. According to Professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the school's five-member admissions committee, members who know a student or a student's family cannot vote on that candidate. Such recusals take place “a handful of times” each year, she said.

  “The purpose is to avoid being an insider's club,” Warren said, while acknowledging the tension between that goal and the school's policy of giving preference to alumni children. “Lawyers may be more sensitive to conflict questions than most disciplines. We worry a lot about unarticu-lated and unintentional biases built into a system.”

  Harvard undergraduate admissions could reduce favoritism by eliminating weak applicants at an early stage of the process. Instead, anyone weeded out by a first cut can be resurrected later. “Everybody in the world is still in play until the last committee meeting at the end of March, when the letters go out,” Fitzsimmons said. Since outstanding applicants would survive the winnowing anyway, this fluidity elevates connections over merit. “Who do you think is being brought back?” Peterson asked. “It's not a kid named Gonzalez from [California's Central Valley]. The kid's going to be named Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.” He estimated that if the first cut were final, the number of children of COUR members admitted would drop in half.

  Instead, hooked applicants get the nod at the last minute from the admissions committee—which at Harvard, as at most elite universities, is largely composed of admissions officials and faculty. As one former Harvard official described these deliberations, “It comes down to the last day and you have twenty tickets still to give. You're tipping people in and out. It's not over till it's over. You're weighing the black kid from Harlem or the Appalachian kid against the alumni son.”

  Such last-minute horse trading has a long history at Harvard. Half a century ago, Albert F. Gordon came out a winner. The son of Albert H. Gordon, a Wall Street financier and Harvard graduate who was already on his way to becoming one of the university's biggest donors, the younger Al applied in 1955 despite breaking the honor code at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where he had been caught cheating on a chemistry final exam. It didn't help that he failed geometry as well. “I was a lousy student,” Gordon confided over breakfast in November 2004 at an inn just outside Harvard Yard. “There's no one who ever had as much tutoring as I did through all my school years.”

  Nevertheless, Gordon said, his father's influence prevailed. Wilbur Bender, then dean of admissions, had made up his mind to reject the younger Gordon until, on the last day of deliberations that year, Delmar Leighton, then Harvard dean of students, made a rare appearance before the admissions committee. “I only have to tell you one thing,” Leighton said to the committee. “Albert Gordon has to be on the list.”

  Gordon scraped through Harvard—“I had to sweat every exam,” he said—and had a successful career as an investment banker at Kidder, Peabody&Co., the firm his father had rescued from collapse during the Great Depression. Albert H. Gordon, who turned 104 in 2005 but remains active, has given $30 million to Harvard. The younger Al has chipped in with another $5.3 million to the university, where his daughter, three siblings, and four nephews and nieces also enrolled. Al used to belong to the Committee on University Resources; three family members remain on the committee, including his father and a sister on the executive committee. “The committee is nothing more than a meat market,” Al said. “They parade you around, and if you don't give enough, your kid won't get in.”

  Al said the admissions wheeling and dealing hasn't changed much since he applied to Harvard: relatives and friends whom he or his father recommends often find their way into the student body. While acknowledging that this kowtowing to donors is unfair to outsiders who aren't part of the club, he said it's vital to sustaining fund-raising and alumni loyalty.

  “This is why I do what I do for Harvard,” he said. “They were damned decent to me. So they get rewarded, big-time. This is why Harvard is loved by so many people. Guys that do very well, that get through Harvard very easily, they could care less.”

  ANNIE GRAYSON was not inducted into the Cum Laude Society at Hotchkiss, a Lakeville, Connecticut, boarding school. Although Hotchkiss does not officially rank students, a person familiar with her record told me that Annie's grades placed her slightly below the middle of her class. Her SAT score was in the 1200s, at least 200 points under the Harvard average.

  Harvard would give short shrift to an unhooked applicant with those credentials. But Annie was the daughter of Boston-area venture capitalist Bruns H. Grayson Jr., a Harvard alumnus and member of the Committee on University Resources. Her mother, Perrin, also graduated from Harvard. In 2003-4, Annie's senior year at Hotchkiss, her parents gave Harvard at least $1 million. In his thirtieth-anniversary report to his classmates that year, Grayson, quoting the poet Robert Browning, noted that he has “plenty of money, money enough and to spare.”

  When Annie applied, Harvard placed her on its waiting list. Then, shortly after her Hotchkiss graduation, Harvard notified her that she had been admitted—but with a twist. She could not enroll with her fellow high school graduates at Harvard that September; instead, she had to wait a year, until fall 2005, before entering as a freshman. The Grayson family declined comment for this book.

  If wealthy or well-connected applicants aren't admitted to Harvard in the standard fashion, they need not despair. Like Annie Grayson, they may be placed on the “Z-list”—a Harvard admissions office term for a little-known policy that compromises standards in the interests of alumni and donors, enabling their children to enter America's most famous university by a side door. The Z-list consists of twenty-five to fifty well-connected but often academically borderline applicants accepted on condition they defer enrollment until the following fall—when they occupy slots that could otherwise be given to outstanding but unhooked applicants.

  Harvard also wait-listed Annie Grayson's Hotchkiss classmate Kath-erine Campo but didn't offer her deferred admission. Katherine, who enrolled at Brown instead, was a top student at Hotchkiss and a member of the Cum Laude Society and had a higher SAT score than Annie. “Annie was a great kid, really enthusiastic, outgoing,” Katherine told me. “She deserves to go anywhere. But in terms of actual numbers, there are a ton of people who should have gotten in over her. She wasn't at the top.

  “Personally, I don't like” preferences for children of alumni and donors, Katherine added. “It should all be based on merit. If I didn't know Annie, I would be angry and bitter. The frustrating thing is knowing there are really smart kids who don't have the opportunity.”

  The Harvard Crimson reported in 2002 that 72 percent of students on the “Z-list” are alumni children. My research showed that quite a few children of COUR members deferred admission for a year, sometimes more than one child in the same family. Annie Grayson's sister, Lucy, who graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire in 2001, delayed a year before entering Harvard.

  Ashley Hobbs—daughter of COUR executive committee member Franklin W. Hobbs IV—took a year off after graduating from Hotchkiss, where she didn't rank in the top 20 percent. Her father, an investment banker, was elected to Harvard's board of overseers in 2000; among other donations, he gave Harvard between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2003-4, when Ashley was a sophomore.

  “In my experience, students on the Z-list were connected kids, sometimes but not always academically weaker,” Susan Case, former college counselor at Milton Academy, told me. “I could usually predict who might end up with that option by seeing the family's history.”

  Harvard says that the Z-list isn't meant specifically for children of alumni and donors, but for all students whom it would like to take off the waiting list but can't find beds for. “The idea is that when we finally run out of spaces every year, we'll offer twenty, thirty, forty people the chance to come a year from now,” admissions dean William Fitzsimmons told me. If there is a preponderance of alumni children, he said, it's because they're more dedicated to Harvard and more familiar with the deferral option than other applicants; they'll hang on longer, hoping to make the Z-list, rather than enrolling at another university.

  However, one family's experience suggests that Harvard identifies Z-list candidates much earlier. Fitzsimmons interviewed legacy Hayden Jaques in the summer before his senior year at Milton Academy and asked if he would be willing to take a year off before enrolling in 2002, according to Hayden's mother, Beverly Jaques, who was working as a Harvard fundraiser at the time. (Hayden's father, William Jaques, had been Harvard's director of major gifts in the 1980s.) Hayden, who was not in the Cum Laude Society at Milton, spent his gap year traveling in Costa Rica and Spain before entering Harvard, where he joined the Fly Club and rugby team and graduated in 2006.

  Fitzsimmons said that the Z-list originated in the late 1970s as part of an effort by Harvard to encourage students to take a year off before college. According to admissions insiders, the list gradually evolved into a legacy program. For Harvard, deferral was a no-lose proposition: either it would discourage underqualified legacies from enrolling without actually rejecting them, thus preserving both academic quality and donor goodwill, or the students would mature in their year off, readying them for Harvard. It turned out that most Z-listers were willing to wait for a Harvard education. Twenty-four out of thirty-four students on the list in 2003, and forty out of forty-eight in 2004, accepted the deferred admission, according to Fitzsimmons.

  Harvard touts deferral in an essay, “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation,” which it sends to Z-listed students and features on its admissions website. Written by Fitzsimmons and two other Harvard officials, the article contends that a year off helps students relax and mature. “Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a ‘time off is to postpone entrance to college for a year,” they write. “After all the places in the current class are filled, a small number of outstanding applicants have been offered the opportunity to come to Harvard for the subsequent academic year…. The results have been uniformly positive.”

  Harvard does not tell students how to spend the interim year. Wealthy legacies often sign up for expensive backpacking expeditions or sailing trips. Michael Meighan, director of programs for Sea-mester, a Sarasota, Florida, outfit that charges students $14,500 to sail for eighty days in the Caribbean on a traditionally rigged schooner and learn leadership and team-building skills, told me that at least three students deferred by Harvard had spent part of their year off in its programs. One was Ashley Hobbs, who participated in “Club Snork n'Fun” during her Caribbean voyage. “After her sailing days here, she will travel to Italy for the spring and then begin school at Harvard in the fall,” the organization's newsletter reported.

  For well-connected students, the Z-list isn't the only roundabout route to a Harvard degree. Instead of deferring for a year, they can enroll somewhere else and then transfer in. In general, students at other colleges who seek to transfer to Harvard face even more daunting odds than freshman applicants; Harvard typically admits only 5 percent of its one thousand transfer candidates a year. But, as in freshman admissions, children of alumni and donors enjoy a marked preference in the transfer process.

  Richard L. Menschel, a Harvard Business School graduate and a senior director at Goldman Sachs, cochaired Harvard's $2.6 billion campaign in the 1990s and sits on the COUR executive committee. His wife, Ronay Menschel, also a COUR member, is a former deputy mayor of New York City. They have given generously to Harvard's business school, school of public health, and art museums. The Menschels” two older daughters, Charis and Sabina, both went to Harvard. The third, Celene, was not in the top 10 percent of her class at her fashionable New York City prep school, Nightingale Bamford.

  She matriculated in 2000 at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, where she flourished academically and on the women's crosscountry team. After two years, she was admitted to Harvard as a transfer— an unusual leap from a respectable liberal arts college to America's premier university. According to Connecticut College, only one student in its five prior classes had transferred to Harvard.

  Ned Bishop, track coach at Connecticut College, told me that Celene was reluctant to leave. While she starred on his team, he said, she wasn't a standout at Harvard, which competes in a tougher division. “I got some impression, in terms of running, she wished she had still been part of our team,” he said. “My sense of her transferring was just the family connection to Harvard. She felt a little bit of family obligation to go to Harvard if she could.”

  THE ACADEMIC and status differences between children of COUR members and unhooked students persist even after the chosen few enroll at Harvard. They share one campus but move in separate worlds. The donors” children lag behind scholastically and forge ahead socially. Coming from the same fashionable prep schools or neighborhoods, playing the same upper-class sports, they often end up living together, eating together, and hanging out together in Harvard's exclusive “finals clubs.”

  Long dominated by prep school graduates and athletes, Harvard's semisecret finals clubs, like the eating clubs at Princeton, offer a party scene and behind-the-scenes job network for the affluent. COUR executive committee member Ernest Monrad, a Boston money manager who has endowed two Harvard chairs, recalled that he got his start after law school at a Boston firm because he and the senior partner both belonged to the Fox club. “It got me the interview,” Monrad said. Two of his sons and a grandson have followed him to Harvard, and all three joined finals clubs: AD, Fox, and Fly. “I've got two grandchildren up for admission” to Harvard now, he told me. “I'm just going to stay away. They know my name, I think.”

  University Resources committee members Richard Cashin Jr. and Jonathan Kemper, a Kansas City banker, graduated from Harvard in the same year, 1975. Cashin was in the Owl Club, Kemper in the Phoenix. Nearly thirty years later, their daughters, Frances Cashin and Charlotte Kemper, were Harvard roommates. “Last year, I was at a dinner table, and we were all legacies there except one girl,” Charlotte told me. “She said, ‘Maybe I should leave.’” Although Charlotte can't belong to her father's club, which remains all-male, she said she occasionally goes to parties there.

  At universities with significant dropout rates, just graduating is a mark of academic achievement. But it's much tougher to get into Harvard than to graduate from it; 97 percent of entering freshmen emerge with a degree. Thus, the honors—or lack thereof—awarded students upon graduation offer a better yardstick for measuring scholastic prowess. By examining honors data on 192 COUR members” children who graduated from Harvard since 1980,1 found that they were more likely to graduate without honors and less likely to attain the top two categories of distinction (magna and summa cum laude, aka high and highest honors) than the Harvard average. Typically, the number of Harvard students who receive high or highest honors exceeds those graduating without honors. In my sample, the reverse was true. About one-fifth, or thirty-nine children of donors, earned summa or magna degrees, while more than one-fourth, or fifty, graduated without honors, including three of James Welch's six sons. (The balance, 103, graduated with honors—cum laude.) Overall, only one-tenth of Harvard graduates were not given honors in 2004, down from 22 percent in 1990.

  The lackluster performance of the donors” children may reflect their lesser high school credentials. Alternatively, they may be less motivated to excel in the classroom than other students because their financial security is ensured.

  There are, of course, conspicuous exceptions to this pattern. Elizabeth, Fernanda, and Charlotte Winthrop come from the twelfth generation of their family at Harvard, where a dormitory is named Winthrop House. Both of their parents are Harvard graduates; their father, investment adviser Grant Winthrop, is on the Committee on University Resources. But the sisters haven't coasted on their blue-blooded pedigrees. All three were top students at Nightingale-Bamford before entering Harvard. Elizabeth graduated summa cum laude in 2001, winning a fiction prize for writing the best short story by an undergraduate. Fernanda graduated magna cum laude in 2004, the same year that Charlotte enrolled.

  In high school, Charlotte told me, she was valedictorian and senior class president and edited the literary magazine. Her SAT score was 1480— about Harvard's average. After her junior year at Nightingale, at her father's instigation, she met with Fitzsimmons. “We mainly talked about travel,” she said. “I have a big interest in Southeast Asia. I'd like to think I would have gotten in had I not been a legacy. But there are so many qualified people who apply that I'm sure it helps.”

  Another Harvard legacy from Nightingale-Bamford, Elizabeth Niemiec, became disillusioned with the snobbish club scene of the campus jet set. Her father, investment banker David Niemiec, and her mother, Melanie Niemiec, are both Harvard graduates and COUR members. A top Nightingale student with a 1520 SAT score, Elizabeth was also admitted to Pomona and Williams colleges and Wesleyan University. Although she preferred Pomona, her parents persuaded her to go to Harvard. While she was applying there, a staff member in the development office who had been a classmate of her father's showed her around campus and introduced her to the head of Harvard's environmental science and public policy department, her field of interest. During her freshman year, 2000-1, her parents gave Harvard between $250,000 and $500,000.