I think it is pretty easy for most parents to steer their kids away from schools they think are too liberal or too conservative just when making a list. We started by making lists of the kinds of schools my kids were interested in. One has quite a few LDS friends, but BYU wasn’t on her list even though she would have put it on if I weren’t involved. There are quite a few schools I don’t like, so I just never mentioned them. If one of my kids was “Harvard or Bust,” I’d try to talk her out of it, but in the end it would have been her choice whether to apply after a good deal of input on why I don’t like it. And then I’d do my voodoo curse on the AO to have her rejected.
We looked at some that turned out to be much too liberal for one daughter who is rather conservative. We didn’t make a big deal about it, it was just off the list and move on. Not picking Harvard doesn’t mean her only choices were Liberty or Ave Maria. Plenty of room between the poles.