Top schools now have record low admission rates, but only some students have to worry about what that means for their chances. Legacy admissions, at elite institutions especially, put a select few at a distinct advantage. Harvard's incoming class of 2021 is made up of over 29 percent legacy students, reports The Harvard Crimson. Last year's applicants who had Harvard in their blood were three times more likely to get into the school than those without. The case is the same at Stanford. In fact, across the top 30 schools in the U.S., one review from 2011 discussed in the Washington Post found that children of alumni "had a 45 percent greater chance of admission" than other applicants.

Commencement ceremonies at the Harvard Business School campus in Boston, MA. Rick Friedman | Corbis | Getty Image

Legacy students tend to be wealthy and white, students who, as a group, are already disproportionately represented at college. The New York Times found that, at five Ivy League schools, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown, as well as 33 other colleges, there are more students from families in the top one percent than from the entire bottom 60 percent. That's not an accident. In fact, in the early 20th century, universities introduced a preference for legacies on purpose to exclude less-desirable applicants, such as immigrants, and to keep their campuses homogeneous, Think Progress reports. Princeton adopted a comprehensive admissions process in 1922, which led to a drop in its Jewish student population. The chairman of Princeton's Board of Admissions acknowledged that he had wanted to solve their "Jewish problem." Nowadays, supporters of this tradition are more likely to argue that alumni with kids at their alma mater will be more inclined to donate and so boost overall fundraising. But that claim has been proven false. As the Washington Post notes, Chad Coffman found in his book, "Affirmative Action for the Rich," that when seven colleges stopped accounting for legacy status during the admissions process between 1998 and 2008, there was "no short-term measurable reduction in alumni giving."