The CCs at our school used to put CDS stats of several similar schools next to each other - without names. They’d ask everyone to guess the schools.
Then they’d do the “reveal”, adding % accepted and merit. It’d become apparent quite quickly that there were few differences except geography or a top football program, and that some of those “sleepers” were in fact hidden treasure.
You can do a variant of this with your kid. It’s very illustrative of how blindered most of us are . This really helped us expand our search beyond the usual suspects and to think about quality on our own terms.