Duke is not alone in making this trade-off. While legacy preference is primarily a fund-raising tool, universities justify it with rhetoric about preserving valuable traditions and rewarding loyal volunteers. There's no such justification for the students known as “development admits”— the children of wealthy nonalumni. They are the dirty little secret of college admissions. These students are often substantially underqualified and have no familial connection to the school. Their strongest advocates come from the development, or fund-raising, office, and their primary qualification is the money their parents are expected to give to the school upon acceptance.

  Colleges, which understate the extent of legacy preference, often deny that they have development admits. Just as great newspapers guarantee the objectivity of their reports by separating selling of advertisements from the gathering of information, so great universities profess to safeguard the quality of their student bodies by constructing a firewall between fund-raising from admissions.

  In reality, there is no such wall—not even a shallow trench. Almost every university takes development admits, and the practice is increasingly prevalent, fueled by larger economic forces. Reflecting the growing income gap in American society, the ranks of the iiber-nch are multiplying. The number of billionaires on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans increased from 13 in 1982 to 374 in 2005. Like other nonprofits, colleges want a piece of that action—and the easiest way is to admit these moguls” children.

  Until recently, relatively few colleges emphasized raising money from nonalumni parents. Their attitude has been that alumni give for a lifetime, while parents give only while their children are in college. Plus, parents already paid tuition. But with corporate and government money declining as a proportion of total higher education support since the mid-1980s, and with the number of people who could afford a major gift on top of tuition swelling, college development officers began looking beyond their traditional alumni constituency to nonalumni parents and other potential donors with whom they could claim a connection, however remote.

  For appearances” sake, most colleges are careful to avoid making explicit deals or promises while the application is under review. But once the student is admitted they're quick to solicit contributions or invite parents to join a fund-raising group. Duke and other colleges deny selling slots— “There's no quid pro quo, no bargains have been struck,” Duke's director of development communications, Peter Vaughn, told me—but there's a mutual understanding that one good turn deserves another.

  When pressed to justify development admits, college administrators sometimes claim a social benefit to ensuring that children of the rich enjoy an elite education. These students will someday inherit considerable wealth, the argument goes, and a good education will incline them to use it or give it away more wisely. But this argument doesn't account for what economists would call the “opportunity cost,” or forgone benefits, of this policy. To make room for the unexceptional rich, elite colleges turn away brighter, upwardly mobile applicants who may take advantage of their education to accumulate just as much wealth by starting a business or making a scientific advance that enhances the health and welfare of society. Like legacies, development admits are held to a lesser standard—not whether they are the best candidates in the pool but whether they can graduate—and take the place of more deserving students, including those from low-or middle-income backgrounds.

  Top universities ranging from Stanford to Emory say they occasionally consider parental wealth in admissions decisions. “We do advise the admissions office about applications coming from the children or grandchildren of significant donors,” Yale president Richard Levin told the university's alumni magazine in 2004. “Which doesn't mean that they are automatically admitted!” At New York University, the associate provost for admissions, the head of fund-raising, and the president's chief of staff meet every Monday to discuss a three-page list of about forty applicants whose parents are leaders in business, politics, media, and entertainment. “The list comes from different places,” said Barbara Hall, associate provost for admissions. “A dean may put us on to somebody, the board of trustees, the president, the development office, whatever. If it's a close call, the decision will go in favor of the student.”

  Students who eschew a development edge may suffer for their scruples. In 1998, despite her mother's urging, Caroline Braga decided not to tell Brown University that one of her maternal ancestors, William E Sayles, endowed Sayles Hall on campus in 1881. Despite a 1430 SAT score, she was rejected and went instead to Georgetown, which accepts a higher proportion of applicants than Brown. “I was a little bit naive,” she said. “In an ideal world, I wouldn't include preferences. In the real world, you use whatever tools you have to get where you want to go.” Michael Goldberger, Brown director of admission from 1995 to 2005, acknowledged that “having a building named after your family on our campus would be a plus factor.”

  The length of a college's development list depends on the school's financial well-being and alumni resources. Traditional elite schools, such as Harvard or Yale, reap so much money from alumni that they rarely bother to chase any but the richest nonalumni children. On the other hand, for young, aggressive universities without a long-nurtured and deep-pocketed alumni base, development admits offer a quick endowment fix, as well as an opportunity to jump-start a family pattern of giving.

  Although it had earlier roots as a Methodist college, Duke was not established as a university until the 1920s. From 1994 to 2003, according to the Council for Aid to Education, Duke received only 20.5 percent of its nongovernmental revenue from alumni, far less than Princeton's 54.6 percent, Yale's 52.7 percent, and Harvard's 41.8 percent. Instead, Duke has cultivated wealthy nonalumni by giving breaks to their children who fall below its rigid admissions standards.

  In the late 1990s, at the height of a fund-raising campaign and a soaring stock market, Duke relaxed its standards to admit more than one hundred applicants a year who would have been turned away without pressure from the development office. More than half of them enrolled, constituting an estimated 3 to 5 percent of Duke's student body of 6,200. Many of their grateful fathers and mothers joined Duke's parent fund-raising group, which year after year led all universities nationwide in unrestricted gifts to its annual fund from nonalumni parents.

  “A Duke education is too valuable an asset to squander,” former Duke president Keith Brodie told me. “University presidents are under greater pressure than ever to raise money. I suspect many of them have turned to admissions to help that process.”

  Duke's pandering to rich applicants may have fostered divisions within its student body and between the university and the surrounding community. According to annual student surveys conducted by The Princeton Review, members of different races and social classes interact less at Duke than at most other major universities. Such tensions flared painfully in spring 2006 when three members of Duke's virtually all-white men's lacrosse squad were indicted in connection with the alleged rape of a black single mother, a student at a predominantly black university nearby, who had been hired to dance at a team party. All three athletes came from affluent suburbs and attended exclusive private high schools. All charges were dismissed in April 2007.

  Duke's thirst for development admits also left it vulnerable to a con artist. In the late 1980s, a continuing-education student calling himself Baron Maurice Jeffrey Locke de Rothschild cut quite a figure at Duke, driving expensive cars, buying champagne for frat parties, befriending top university administrators, and boasting about his famed European banking relatives. When the local banks called in his chits, the baron turned out to be Mauro Cortez Jr., a Mexican American of modest means from El Paso, whose assumed surname had been a shrewd ploy to vault him into an elite university. In 1991, the not-so-nobleman was sentenced to three years in prison for bank fraud.

  BEFORE STUDENTS from affluent families can be admitted, they have to apply. That doesn't happen only by chance. Colleges shape the economic status of their applicant pool through recruiting. To attract rich candidates, they target promotional mailings to families in the wealthiest zip codes, or send admissions staff to stir up interest at elite private and suburban high schools.

  Bates College, a liberal arts school in Maine that prided itself on its lack of snobbishness, discovered around 1980 that egalitarianism was getting expensive. Its loyal alumni couldn't afford major gifts, its students were financially needier than those of rivals such as Bowdoin and Middle-bury, and the number of college-bound teenagers from its traditional base in rural and suburban New England public schools was declining. According to Susan Tree, director of admissions from 1979 to 1991, Bates reacted with a twofold strategy—recruiting more intensively at private schools while placating liberal faculty by also seeking minority and inner-city students.

  “Bates wanted to admit children of people with a history of philanthropy, and it influenced where we chose to travel to recruit,” Tree said. “Bates did not have as strong a history at the big independent schools where heavy hitters tend to send children. We began in the late 1970s being more intentional about developing our relationships with independent schools where there are lots more of these people.” Tree herself began min-ing private schools in metropolitan New York, where Bates was little known. The tactic worked, she says; applications soared from 2,300 to 4,000 a year as Bates raised both its stature in the prep school world and its endowment. But it lost a certain modesty in the process, she says: “It's become much more elitist in its self-image.”

  Tree says Bates did lower academic standards for some wealthy prep school applicants, but she defends their admission. “I remember one wonderful Bates family which sent three children to the college, each of whom was out of the profile,” she told me in an email. “We admitted them because of our relationship with their independent schools and faith that they would succeed at Bates and make some valuable contributions. The schools were ones we were hoping to do more business with and, while not proven scholars, it was clear that these kids were leaders and viewed very positively by the faculty and their peers. We were right and never regretted the decisions. The parents became avid supporters of the college. There was never any thought in the mind of the admission staff ahead of time that this family would do anything for the college—but they certainly did.”

  Prep schools—which admit their own legacies and development cases—understand only too well what recruiters are seeking. Eager to place as many graduates as possible at top institutions, prep school counselors help colleges identify development admits, often through an unobtrusive phrase or two in a letter of recommendation stating that the parents have been generous to the prep school and are likely to give to their child's college as well. The prep school's fund-raising office may call the college to reinforce the message.

  In return, colleges often tip off prep schools in advance about which students they intend to take. Colleges also consult the school counselors about whether they can get away with accepting a low-performing student from a wealthy family while rejecting a standout of lesser means. Taking a development case “out of context,” as this practice is euphemistically known, can hurt a college's reputation if it isn't handled deftly. Colleges sometimes accept a high-achieving applicant they don't really want, just so they can take an underqualified development case without causing too much consternation among classmates and parents. Or they tell the prep school that the development prospect must achieve a certain minimum SAT score to be admitted.

  “If ten students apply from a school, you don't want to take numbers one, two, and eight,” said Jean Scott, the former Duke admissions director. “Occasionally, we'd go back and take someone stronger who was on the bubble, for whom a rejection would be extraordinarily painful. You want to make the kid who worked hard and got a 95 average feel they were treated with something resembling justice.”

  A last-minute intervention by university fund-raisers can reverse a pending rejection. Susan Tree, who became director of college counseling at Westtown School in Pennsylvania after leaving Bates, recalled “one year when on a Monday in March, Wesleyan told me that a particular senior would not be admitted. Three days later the student told me joyfully that he received an admission letter…. I went to my office and called my liaison in admissions and said, ‘Is this a mistake?” He (a rookie) said, ‘Oh no,” they had received a call from the development office and the decision was changed.”

  How MUCH does it cost to buy your child's way into college? Educational consultants say a five-figure donation—as low as $20,000—is enough to draw the attention of a liberal arts college with an endowment in the hundreds of millions. At an exclusive college, it can take at least $50,000 with some assurance that future donations will be even greater. At top-25 universities, a minimum of $100,000 is required; for the top 10, at least $250,000 and often seven figures.

  It's considered crass for wealthy parents to approach college officials directly with a financial proposal while their child is applying. “Everyone in my position was offered bribes,” said Mary Anne Schwalbe, former associate dean for admissions at Harvard. Parents would come in for their child's interview, she said, and then ask to speak to her privately. “They would say, ‘Not only will I give Harvard $1 million, but I'll give you and your husband a house or a cruise,”” Mrs. Schwalbe recalled, laughing. “I'd come home and Douglas [her husband] would say, ‘Do it!””

  Parents have better luck negotiating through intermediaries—the prep school's development head, a friend on the university board of trustees, or an independent college counselor. Steven Roy Goodman, an independent counselor who advises students on college admissions, said that as long as his clients are “in striking distance” academically, his job is to facilitate their admission to the college of their choice by any legitimate means—including playing the development card. His method, he said, is to find the college's “weak link”—what it needs most that the parents can provide. “I try to see if there are any resources the parent has that could be helpful: cash, internships, a foundation or job-related things,” he said. Once he's analyzed how the parents can be useful, he calls a contact at the college to say he's advising a potential development case and says, “Here are the credentials. The parents could be involved in this sector or that sector.” His follow-up depends on the response he gets. In one case, he said, a client wanted to go to a well-regarded liberal arts college but was “barely in striking range.” The student applied early and was deferred to the regular pool, whereupon his father, a lawyer, offered to give in the range of $75,000-100,000 to the college and have his firm sponsor internships for students and host forums on campus. The applicant was admitted.

  Goodman likened such pledges to colleges to a political action committee's contributions to political candidates. In each case, there is rarely an explicit deal: the candidate does not promise to enact the giver's agenda, any more than the college agrees to admit the student. But in both situations, the donor buys access and a sympathetic hearing—and a skeptic might wonder if there is any real difference between this understanding and a formal quid pro quo. For applicants and parents who want to believe in the incorruptibility of college admissions, it's hardly a reassuring analogy.

  THE FAMILY of oil tycoon Robert Bass illustrates the power of fund-raising priorities in admissions to elite colleges. Billionaires” children are like top quarterbacks: they go anywhere they want, displacing students with more potential but smaller bankrolls. They don't need 4.0 GPAs or longstanding legacy ties to get into the selective university of their choice. Once enrolled, they enjoy a range of coveted extracurricular perks—from memberships in clubs and fraternities to a seat on the bench of a premier varsity team—and gain the credentials and inside contacts to extend their family's wealth into the next generation.

  In the late 1930s, Robert Bass's great-uncle, Sid Richardson, discovered the Keystone oil field in West Texas. It became the wellspring of a family fortune that soon caught the Ivy League's attention. Sid's nephew and business partner, Perry Richardson Bass, and Perry's four sons—Sid, Edward, Robert, and Lee—all graduated from Yale. All five made Forbes magazine's 2005 list of the 400 richest Americans; Robert ranked 73rd in the United States and first among Basses with $3 billion. His children didn't follow Robert to New Haven, or their mother, Anne, to Smith College. They opted for three other top 10 universities—Harvard, Stanford, and Duke. At each of those institutions, their parents have become among the biggest donors.

  The Bass children became accustomed to development preference at an early age; all four attended elite prep schools where their father and/or mother have been donors and trustees. In 1993, Duke admitted the eldest Bass child, Christopher, from Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. Three years later, while Christopher was still an undergraduate, the Basses pledged $10 million to the university.

  In a subsequent article lauding the fund-raising prowess of Duke's then-president, Nannerl O. Keohane, the Raleigh News&Observer linked Christopher's admission to the donation: “In the case of this year's Bass family gift, Keohane's courtship began when the school recruited the son three years ago. The parents were invited to join the board of visitors for Trinity College, sort of a mini-board of trustees whose job it is to support the school that enrolls about 80 percent of undergraduates. Duke then showered the family with little amenities such as tickets to basketball games.” In 2001, the Basses gave another $10 million, and two years later Anne Bass became a Duke trustee.