Steven Goodman, a private consultant whose job is to get clients accepted to top colleges, for the most part gives out advice on mundane topics, such as which schools to apply to and how to write an application. That can change dramatically following what he calls the arm-on-theshoulder conversation.

“The dad, usually, will pull me aside,” Mr. Goodman said. Then the father will say, “I really appreciate what you’re doing for my son or daughter, but we have a lot of resources, and we’re willing to do something more,” the consultant said.

A series of steady donations to a university of the parents’ and child’s choice follows, Mr. Goodman said, usually targeted to a carefully selected area of need in which the family has some expertise or connections — a new theater program, say, or a new library. Sometimes, the student will know about the transactions; sometimes, she won’t.

The student is accepted between 85% and 90% of the time, he said. “Ask not what your Ivy League school can do for you. Ask what you can do for your Ivy League school,” Mr. Goodman said in explaining the strategy.

The college consulting industry has ballooned since Mr. Goodman began his career 18 years ago, but most consultants have focused, at least publicly, on universities’ admissions offices, not their fundraising arms.

A Duke University graduate who also has a law degree from University of Southern California and a master’s in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Goodman said he has worked with students from across the country, including many top New York City private schools, and with nearly every top university. (He named Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wellesley, Boston University, and Brown.)

Several universities said a donation alone cannot buy acceptance. In distinguishing between thousands of highly qualified applicants, admissions officers at Yale take many factors into account, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, Jeffrey Brenzel, said.

Underrepresented racial groups , children of alumni, and those from poor backgrounds all get a level of positive consideration, but ultimately no one factor can secure an admission, Mr. Brenzel said.

“We certainly attend to someone’s institutional ties, just as we attend to every other part of their background,” Mr. Brenzel said. “But it’s one element out of a very large set of puzzle pieces.”

Mr. Goodman said he begins socalled development cases when a child is in ninth grade. Depending on how much time he devotes, the charge is anywhere between $7,000 and $43,000. The amount families send to a university can range from “a year’s tuition” to several million dollars, he said.

Donations must be regularly deposited, preferably over the course of three or four years at least, and caringly given. Contact is always verbal, he said, explaining why he could not provide documentation of his practices.

Mr. Goodman’s practice is more typical than many admissions consultants are willing to admit, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Golden, who spoke to Mr. Goodman for his book “The Price of Admission,” said.

A higher education activist who is a former admissions counselor, Lloyd Thacker, called consultants who do not focus their work on a student’s own merits “unconscionable.” “What does that do to a kid’s confidence? To a kid’s sense of justice?” Mr. Thacker said. “To the extent that there’s an underbelly to the gaming that goes on in this, that is the most fetid part of the underbelly.”

In an e-mail message, a former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, said he is “very worried about admissions practices that reward fortunate applicants.”

Mr. Goodman, who calls himself an “armchair sociologist,” said admissions interests him because of the societal issues at stake. He said he takes ethics seriously; he will never accept a bribe, he said, and he avoids quid pro quo, or explicit guarantees that a donation will produce an acceptance.

A board member at the American Jewish Committee — Mr. Goodman said he was approached for the position because of his unique connections in higher education— Mr. Goodman said he has a side hobby of following the Middle East. A year ago, he said, he traveled to Geneva with the group to discuss the situation in Iran with a Swiss foreign minister.

A spokesman for the group, Kenneth Bandler, called Mr. Goodman “a terrific person.” “What he does in admissions counseling is admirable but unrelated to his involvement with AJC,” he said.

Defending his profession, Mr. Goodman paints himself as a pragmatist. “Universities have never been meritocracies,” he said. “The universities are not trying to do what’s best for the country or what’s best for the student. They’re trying to do what’s best for the university. And so I think that — I’m an advocate for families. The universities have their marketing advisers, and families have me.”