“Believe it or not, most students who really belong at the top-10 schools can handle both looking at reaches AND finding suitable match and safety schools.”
That’s actually not the case, most kids, even the top ones focus way too much on the reaches, sure they’ll apply to safeties and matches, but don’t really think they’ll really attend one of them. Princeton’s EA applications are around 6K, maybe a little higher. It would have some impact in the ivies, maybe Stanford, MIT/Cal Tech, Chicago/NU/Duke a handful of schools. It’s not like UCLA saying they’re reducing class size, that would have an effect.