Do large donations lead directly to questionable admissions? In an investigation for my book, The Price of Admission, I found numerous instances in which a marginally qualified child's acceptance closely preceded or followed a major gift from parents. My conclusion is that legacy and big-donor preferences are unfair across the board. But the counter-argument, that all that money not only keeps the university afloat but funds initiatives like Summers's plan to fully pay for low-income students, holds great sway within the academic community and, for many, justifies the skew.

Many students from big-donor families said they felt some doubt or guilt about their status. But not all: One COUR member's son, a current Harvard student, told me that he graduated in the middle of his prep-school class with an SAT score in the 1300s - "not too good by Harvard standards," he acknowledged. (Harvard's average SAT score runs between 1450 and 1500.) His father, an alumnus, donated more than $1 million to Harvard's last fundraising campaign, plus half a million in his son's freshman year.

"I don't feel guilty," the youth said. "A lot of people I know at Harvard are very, very, very, very intelligent, but they just sit on their asses. With my work ethic and potential, test scores that may be a little less than some others' shouldn't get in the way of possibilities for me and my life." He added that his father donated to Harvard out of love for the institution, not to sway admissions.

The Z-list is rife with similar examples. According to Fitzsimmons, 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; it isn't meant specifically for children of alumni donors. "The idea is that when we finally run out of spaces every year, we'll offer 20, 30, 40 people the chance to come a year from now," Fitzsimmons said.

This common explanation of the Z-list sounds like a rational, even generous policy until one considers the implications: If applicants toward the bottom of the barrel in one class are displacing applicants for the next class, and, as Harvard readily admits, the overall pool of highly qualified applicants has tended to grow, isn't it likely that Z-listers are displacing more-qualified competitors?

Yet, for Harvard, deferral is a no-lose proposition: either it discourages under-qualified legacies from enrolling without actually rejecting them, thus preserving both academic quality and donor goodwill, or at the very least it gives them a chance to mature in their year off, readying them for Harvard. And, perhaps more importantly, it serves to obscure some potentially controversial admissions. Typically Harvard doesn't formally offer candidates a place on the Z-list until after their high school graduations - a discreet last-minute notification that helps forestall complaints from academically superior classmates whom Harvard snubbed. It turns out that most Z-listers are willing to wait for a Harvard education. Forty out of 48 students on the list in 2004 accepted deferred admission.

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

It's easy to think that reserving 40 positions for students whom the college chooses to defer is largely money related. Recent Z-listers have included the daughters of COUR members and money managers Bruns Grayson, Jr. and Franklin W. "Fritz" Hobbs IV, who is also a Harvard Overseer. Annie Grayson and Ashley Hobbs both attended Hotchkiss, a Lakeville, Conn., boarding school. Neither was inducted into Hotchkiss's chapter of the Cum Laude Society, signifying that they did not rank in the top 20% of their classes. A person familiar with Annie Grayson's records said she was slightly below the middle of her class, and her SAT scores were in the 1200s. In 2003-04, Annie's senior year at Hotchkiss, the Graysons gave Harvard at least $1 million. That same year, Ashley Hobbs was a sophomore at Harvard, and her parents gave between $250,000 and $500,000. Ashley, who joined a group called "The Z-List is the New A-List" on Facebook, a student social-networking site, graduated in 2006.

Harvard wait-listed Annie Grayson's Hotchkiss classmate, Katherine Campo, who enrolled at Brown instead. Campo was a top student at Hotchkiss, a member of the Cum Laude Society, and had a higher SAT score than Annie. "Annie was a great kid, enthusiastic, outgoing," Campo 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."

Among those offered Z-list slots this spring was May Lan Dong, the daughter of COUR member Mitchell Dong, who endowed a professorship at the Harvard School of Public Health. His daughter didn't make the Cum Laude Society at her prep school, Buckingham Browne and Nichols in Cambridge. Her mother, Robin Dong, said in June that their daughter was weighing whether to join the Z-list or enroll at Barnard College or the University of Southern California. But, she added, May Lan "is going to be fine academically at Harvard, if she goes there."

The Z-list isn't the only roundabout route to a Harvard degree. Instead of deferring for a year, applicants can enroll somewhere else and then transfer in. Harvard admits only 7.5% of its 1,000 transfer candidates a year. But those odds don't apply to children of donors such as Richard Menschel, a 1959 Harvard Business School graduate and a senior director at Goldman Sachs, who co-chaired 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 % of her class at her New York City prep school, Nightingale-Bamford. She matriculated in 2000 at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., and, in an unusual leap from a second-tier liberal arts college, transferred to Harvard two years later.

The double standard for development cases troubles one alumna who has interviewed prep-school candidates for Harvard for more than a decade. "I would write in my reports, 'There may be many reasons for taking this student, but let's not pretend we're doing this because this is a promising scholar,'" she says. "A couple of times I interviewed kids and I thought, 'I don't even know if they'll make it academically.'" Nevertheless, these applicants were usually admitted.

Several years ago, she asked not to be assigned so many development cases to interview. "I was starting to get a jaundiced view, and I wanted to enjoy the process," she says. "I was finding that I was interviewing kids I wasn't excited about. I like the really intellectual kids."

Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >>