Because of Naviance stats available for around last 7 years at my kid’s HS here in Southern CA, kids, parents and counselors know that around 70~100 kids all apply to similar groups of colleges which include some Ivies, UCLA/Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, CalTech etc. They all know every year, only around 7 ~ 10 kids end up going to Ivies, mostly Cornell, UPenn. Maybe in a special year, there is one Harvard, one Stanford, one MIT, one Yale or Princeton. In contrast, every year, there are 20 to 30 kids attending both UCLA and Berkeley. Because of this, no one is obsessed with getting into any Ivy because simply put, they know the odds are against them. But many of these kids are just as smart, if not smarter academically, than many students who get into Ivies IMO because arguably it’s more difficult to get admitted to top 30 colleges with good merit money than get into top 5 ranked colleges without any merit money.
One side comment is my kid had a home room teacher who knew my kid’s stats but kept on telling us during a teacher/parents conference that my kid should apply to some Cal State schools or University of Portland etc, i.e., just kept on underselling my kid’s chances. I knew he meant well but he made it appear that it would be very difficult for my kid to get into UCLA level of school that I ignored everything he said from that point. It turned out that I had a more accurate evaluation of my kid’s chances. Obviously, he was not one of the teachers my kid asked for LOR.