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The Z-List is the New A-List

illustrations by Barry Blitt

On a mild spring evening last year, about 200 corporate executives, money managers, high-priced consultants, and heirs to family fortunes made their way across Harvard Yard and into Annenberg Hall. Bouquets of forsythia and tulips decorated the freshman dining hall. As the visitors chatted about the latest Hasty Pudding Club show, they enjoyed cocktails, wine, and appetizers - beef tenderloin, crab cakes, asparagus spears - as well as the attentions of Lawrence Summers, then Harvard's president. A student band, perched in a balcony overhead, struck up "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard," and the group sat down to a candlelit dinner. Wine refills put them in an expansive mood; they cheered psychology professor Steven Pinker's abstruse lecture on what irregular verbs tell us about the brain, and they greeted Summers with a standing ovation.

This was the 2005 annual meeting of what is likely the wealthiest advisory group in higher education: Harvard's Committee on University Resources. The COUR is not a committee in the usual sense. It doesn't formally make or consult on university policy, but Harvard's president needs its support nonetheless. Comprised of Harvard's biggest donors - mostly but not exclusively alumni - the COUR forms the backbone of a fundraising machine that raised almost $600 million for the university last year.

To qualify for membership, donors must generally have given at least $1 million to Harvard - or be expected to do so - although a few smaller donors are picked for their prowess in raising large sums on Harvard's behalf from classmates and business associates. The 73 members of the group's inner circle, the executive committee, have typically given or raised at least $5 million, and sometimes much more.The dinner isn't the only sign of Harvard's gratitude to COUR members. The university names athletic facilities, research centers, faculty chairs, fellowships, and scholarships after donors. And in what is arguably the most valuable reward of all, Harvard gives a clear admissions edge to their children.

Like most private American universities, Harvard offers admissions preference to all alumni children, justifying the privilege for "legacies" on the grounds of preserving tradition and rewarding loyal graduates. Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons, Harvard College class of 1967, said legacies deserve a "tip" because alumni "volunteer an immense amount of their free time in recruiting students, raising money for financial aid, taking part in Harvard Club activities at the local level, and in general promoting the college."

That explanation glosses over the grubbier reality: Harvard actually has different levels of legacy preference, systematically and in some ways elaborately distorting its standards on behalf of a certain group. While children of middle-class alumni enjoy a modest edge, which may be heightened somewhat if the parents volunteer to interview applicants or organize reunions, the offspring of major donors receive in effect double preference - both as legacies and "development cases," whose admission is considered vital to fundraising. They fly first-class through Harvard admissions, often enjoying personal interviews with Fitzsimmons and slots on the exclusive "Z" list, which ushers in, via a one-year deferment, well-connected but often academically borderline applicants.

Increasingly, Harvard admissions values money over tradition. While the overall percentage of legacies in entering classes has remained constant at around 13% - roughly 210 out of the 1650 freshmen each year - there are reasons to believe that a growing number of those slots are being reserved for the children of alumni who are big donors or well connected. Two simple pieces of data document the trend: the number of COUR members (whose children enjoy 50% admissions rates) has tripled over the last 15 years. And the number of Z-list admissions has doubled just since 2001; as many as 40 of the students in last year's freshman class were Z-list placements. The Crimson reported in 2002 that an estimated 72% of Z-listers attending Harvard were legacies; if that pattern held this year, then roughly one in seven legacy enrollees arriving on campus last fall had entered via the Z-list.

Alumni of less-than-extravagant means have begun to note the double standard. While COUR executive committee member James O. Welch Jr., a former Nabisco executive who endowed a computer science professorship and the position of men's soccer coach, sent six sons to Harvard, Lynne Breslin had no such luck. Although her late husband, Geoffrey Brown, was also a Harvard graduate, their two sons - both, she says, class presidents in high school with strong academic records - were rejected. They enrolled at Princeton and Wesleyan instead.

"There are certain families where every kid gets in," said Breslin, an architect. "They're also class marshal and giving a fortune. Then there are the rest of us."

Golden illustration 3 Disillusioned with the admissions process, some alumni question the implications for the values of their alma mater. When the child of two Harvard alumni, both professionals, was denied admission recently despite ranking in the top 10 percent at a premier public high school in the New York City area and scoring "just below" 1600 on the SAT, the student's mother acknowledged feeling "some sour grapes." The child was admitted to another Ivy League university, and has excelled there, but the rejection rankled. "The most interesting people I knew when I was in college were not people who had a lot of money," the mother said. "They have continued to be the most interesting people I know. I wonder whether Harvard," by favoring the wealthy, "isn't closing itself off from some of the more interesting applicants."

Corroborating my findings, a 1991 study by David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr, concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their admissions advantage if they apply for financial aid. "My interpretation," Karen told me, "was that, if you couldn't parlay a Harvard degree into an income sufficient to pay for your kid's education, Harvard was less likely to make the same mistake twice."

The Z-List is the New A-List

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."

The Z-List is the New A-List

Along with making large contributions, it also pays to be friendly with admissions staff. Every year, Michael Holland runs the Boston Marathon with Fitzsimmons, his old friend from college days. "We have a long time to talk about everything," said Holland, a COUR member and major donor. But neither man has ever regarded the friendship as a reason for the dean to remove himself from evaluating Holland's children. On the contrary, Holland says, Fitzsimmons personally interviewed "one or two" of his sons. Three of Holland's six sons enrolled at Harvard.

While Harvard Law School has a conflict-of-interest policy, Harvard College does not. According to Professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the law 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.

But Fitzsimmons, who served as director of the Harvard College Fund before becoming admissions dean, told me he knows so many Harvard alumni that it would be impractical for him to withdraw from considering their children's applications. "We say to anybody, whether it's a Harvard person or not, if they feel they can add something to a student's application, send it in," he said. "We're in the information business."

"Lawyers may be more sensitive to conflict questions than most disciplines," Warren said. "We worry a lot about unarticulated and unintentional biases built into a system." Still, like Harvard College, the law school takes care of its benefactors: four sons of Harvard Law School alum Finn Caspersen, one of its biggest donors and chair of its current fundraising campaign, went to Harvard Law.

Harvard undergraduate admissions could reduce favoritism by eliminating weak applicants early in the process. Instead, "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?" asks Lloyd Peterson, a former Yale admissions officer. "It's not a kid named Gonzales. 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.

While some heavyweight Harvard supporters are coy about what they get from the institution in return for their donations, Al Gordon isn't one of them. Half a century ago, Gordon, the son of Albert H. Gordon, a Wall Street financier who was already on his way to becoming one of the university's biggest donors, applied to Harvard despite a dismal record at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H. Young Al had not only failed geometry, but he had been caught cheating on a chemistry final exam, breaking the honor code. "I was a lousy student," Gordon confided over breakfast in November 2004. "There's no one who ever had as much tutoring as I did through all my school years."

Nevertheless, Gordon said, Harvard's appreciation for this father's generosity prevailed, and he was admitted in 1955. He found it tough going academically; "I had to sweat every exam," he recalls. But he went on to have a wildly successful career as an investment banker at Kidder, Peabody & Co., the firm his father had rescued from collapse during the Great Depression. And he has, in turn, paid back Harvard for its generosity, by adding $5.3 million to the $30 million his father gave over the years.

"They were damn decent to me," the younger Gordon says. "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."

For Gordon, Harvard is a family thing - his daughter, three siblings, and four nephews and nieces all enrolled - and so is COUR membership. He used to belong, and three family members remain on the committee, including his father and a sister on the executive committee. Maybe that much involvement gives him the freedom to state what others pretend to deny: "The committee is nothing more than a meat market," he said. "They parade you around and if you don't give enough, your kid doesn't get in."

Daniel Golden, deputy chief of the Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau, is the author of The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, published this month by Crown Publishing Group. He won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting for a series of articles about college admissions preferences for children of alumni and donors. Golden is a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1978.

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