It just means that the application process is in a financial arms raise that (in many cases) squeezes out the talented in favor of the well-heeled.
Which ultimately does not lead to the best outcomes for society.
Even leaving aside the increased competition from test preparation, no matter how you slice it there are a lot more people for the same number of spots.
I graduated from an inner city school in the midwest, no-one in my class was admitted to a top tier school (or even a second tier school, now that I think about it). But there were actually quite a few many who actually applied to Harvard or Princeton and such. I wasn't able to appreciate until recently that activities like band afterschool, cross country, and 4's on AP tests aren't good enough to land a spot in any big-name university. Presumably the number of dead-in-the-bucket applicants like this have gone up, so I'm less inclined to interpret the drop of acceptance rate as some indication that it's suddenly much more difficult for rich kids to get accepted than it used to be a decade ago.
[1]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...