There is an abundance of incorrect advice on this thread.
The following statements are all incorrect:
– “Admission to all of these places is very selective, so the news that so few have been admitted from your high school is meaningless.” Incorrect. It means that your odds of admission are astronomical.
– “Except for serious feeder schools like these https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html the vast majority of HSs will have few if any applicants to top schools, let alone any admits.” Incorrect. The data that a student (or a parent) needs to correctly appraise the relative pull of a given high school in the admissions process has never been published. The WSJ published what they could get their hands on, but it is full of holes. What you really want to know is what is the admissions rate among the Top N schools (with any reasonable but consistently applied definition of ‘Top N’) on an accurate admissions results dataset. This data has never been published, and it never will be. If it were revealed, it would show just how biased this whole process is, and the public outrage would be a national scandal.
– “It [the historical admissions rate performance of the applicant’s high school at a given college–ed.] is however a factor I would not consider too much when drawing up the list of colleges to apply to.” Incorrect. It should be of paramount importance when selecting the list of schools to apply to, especially for target and likely schools. For example, based on the historical admissions performance information, I knew that my D was an automatic admit at many schools that are highly competitive schools–assuming that statistics in the Common Data Sets are not outright fabrications. That performance information is especially useful when thinking about just how many schools you can afford (in both cost and time) to apply to.