'Yep.
If you don’t have a 1400 and a 4.0 good luck getting in places besides state universities"
Flagship State Universities are becoming just as competitive that the 1400/4.0 is not a given for admission, especially at the top 15/20 State schools. If you go on the UF, UGA or Ohio State board, you can actually find plenty of kids with similar scores not being able to get in. What used to be a match and perhaps even a safety school is no longer the case.
Lots of people do not even realize how expensive these Elite Private schools can be since the majority of them do not offer merit (aid yes, but no merit). Niece got into Duke yesterday afternoon (rejected at Harvard, Penn, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, John Hopkins, Yale, and Princeton etc) only to find out that $70K a year does not make sense vs the cushy UNC package (Instate) she received. Probably should have saved herself a lot of aggravation if the parents/kid would have done the research prior to applying. They were never willing to pay full sticker price at any of these schools, to begin with. I can’t imagine why they had to finish all these applications. The kid had close to perfect stats.