Treacy A. Kiley, director of graduate programs for Princeton Review, says she approves financial aid requests for as many as 15 to 20 percent of those enrolled.

The average gift is about $450, she says. While a few rare packages rise as high as $800 off, no one gets a full scholarship.

"It's based on the students' individual situations," says director of marketing Greg A. Johnson. "[But] we would always charge every student something to take our course because it makes for a better student.

Kiley says that in addition to helping level the playing field, financial aid is good business sense--even when the firm loses money on individual students' discounts--because it generates positive word-of-mouth.

But while Kaplan and Princeton Review often tout their financial aid programs to critics, they never advertise them to the public, according to historian Nicholas B. Lemann '76.

"They do it partly out of the goodness of their heart and partly because it's very bad for their image if they come across as the way rich kids beat the system," he says.

Rising Stakes

Lemann, a former Crimson president, studied the origins of test prep companies for his 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.